8 Daily Social Media Activities That Are Essential

 You know you need to use social media for your shop, but how do you go about actually doing it? What should you be focused on daily to be efficient and effective while still running your business? You've sat through numerous seminars and conferences listening to expert consultants tell you that you must be on social media. They tell you that you need to be posting each day to your customers and your community. And, they're right!

 This article is part of a series of posts outlining the daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly activities you should be focused on to make the most of your social media efforts. Make sure to read the entire series and download the supporting documentation and checklists. These are designed specifically for your auto repair business, but these activities are the same for any business.

 4 Weekly Social Media Activities That Are Critical for Shop Owners

The 4 critical social media activities that shops owners should be doing on a weekly basis.

Whether you're just starting out leveraging social media for your business, or you've already been posting to your various social media channels for a while, having a daily prioritized plan and routine will elevate your efforts and your results. Too many times, shop owners and managers will approach their social media tasks haphazardly. No thought is given to actually engaging your audience or how to get them to engage with you. You see, at the end of all this digital social media stuff, it's still about building relationships and trust with your customers and your local community.

...It's still about building relationships and trust with your customers... 

Routines Help 

You already have a daily routine to running your business. If you didn't, you'd constantly be in a reactive state. Being reactive instead of proactive is a sure-fire way to have a struggling business and a stressful work-life. The same is true for your social media efforts.

If you're always being reactive to your approach to posting and your audience, then you'll find yourself struggling to move forward on your social media goals. Shop owners will only struggle with something like social media for so long and then it will fall by the wayside. Then we hear the same old thing, "…social media doesn't work for my business…" or " I tried it, but it my customers are different" or " posting on Facebook doesn't bring me customers". Unfortunately, these situations are all too familiar.

By breaking down the daily tasks and creating a routine for yourself, you'll be able to navigate your social media efforts and achieve some consistency to your results. Scheduling posts, launching ads, listening, and dealing with social influencers is daunting, but having a routine in place and following it will improve your results and move you closer to your goals.

Prioritize Your Work 

When you prioritize your daily routine and tasks, you're ensuring that you complete the most important things first. Again, it's no different from running your overall business. With the checklist below, you'll be able to prioritize your work and achieve consistency by breaking down all your tasks into what needs to be done on a daily basis. We've also created a post addressing the weekly, monthly, and quarterly activities.

Your tasks and priorities might be slightly different, but these seem to be universal for most shop owners. Whether you, a spouse, or another employee, handles your social media make sure to prioritize your activities.

Daily Steps 

The following daily social media activities will help to keep you focused on the right tasks to make your social media effective and efficient.

1. Check and reply to comments and questions

No one likes to be ignored, especially when it comes to customers or even potential customers. Ignoring customers is the quickest way to help your competitors get new business. By responding to the comments and questions that appear on your posts and your channel you're sending the message to the entire community that you listen, and you care.

We've seen business owners actually take the position that they don't want to open up their channel to comments or questions. This is a huge mistake. Don't be afraid of the critical comments. Complaints and criticisms allow you the opportunity to address issues quickly. They also provide you an insight to what might need to be addressed in your business to improve. This brings to mind the old saying, …Sometimes we can't see the forest for the trees. This is your chance to prove you care before your competitors say that you don't. 

 ...Ignoring your customers on social media is like ignoring their phone call to your shop when they have a question...

To maintain your shops brand reputation, you must respond quickly and respectfully to everyone who comments on your posts or submits reviews. Therefore, keeping track of the questions and comments from your current and potential customers is critical. 

2. Find your shops mentions online and respond to them

You customers will discuss your shop online and you need to know what they're saying. But what if they talk about your shop without tagging you or the business? Unfortunately, it happens that people forget to tag you when they are making comments. Therefore, the easiest way to manage these mentions is by using a social monitoring tool.

Of course, you could do basic social monitoring manually.You could to each of your social networks individually and look for mentions, keywords, hashtags, and so on. But that would take your entire day.

Fortunately, you don't have to do that. There is a myriad of social monitoring tools available to you, some are free, and some come at a cost. But they will help you to keep track of your data and identify the most important information. You can read more about social media monitoring tools in our post here.

3. Review and comment on local influencer's posts 

This activity follows along from the previous point regarding monitoring. If you are aware of what the local community is up to in the social space, you can easily jump in with your expert opinion and advice.

Find local influencer's in your community and follow them. These will probably NOT be in the automotive world. These will be individuals your customers would follow and engage with.

For example, you can find a Facebook group for your local community, join it and sit back and monitor the online conversation threads. When a conversation opens up in an area that you can contribute to, then that's when you become involved. You will begin to identify who the most active and followed individuals are in these groups. We call these people influencers. By reviewing and commenting on these influencer's posts, you are building the relationship and trust with the entire community not just the influencer.A word of caution though, DO NOT SELL yourself or your shop services here in these groups. The group members can smell this a mile away and you'll get kicked out of the group.You always want to be adding value to you being part of the group.

4. Explore industry news and hot topics 

You should already be keeping up with the latest updates in the industry. Sharing these with your audience is common decency and a sign of professionalism. Again, just as in monitoring tools, there are many tools out there (like Feedly, Inoreader, or Feeder) that can help you automate this process. That way you don't have to check each information source yourself.

For sharing, we recommend tools that have content curation features that allow you to add RSS feeds from your favorite resources, so you can simply scroll through the list and repost the articles you like.

5. Research trending hashtags 

Using a hashtag with your post is easy. Using a hashtag that's trending and has activity is easy as well, as long as you know how. Your hashtag strategy depends on the goals you want to achieve. Shop awareness, engagement, community reach or some improvement in client relationships all are viable goals. Once you know what you want to accomplish, you need to do some research and decide which hashtags work best for your posts. Let's take a look at some examples.

Location hashtag (local reach) = #autorepairnearYourCity

Shop/ Business Hashtag (shop awareness) = #XYZAutoShop

Daily interest hashtags (daily audience) = #WednesdayWisdom

6. Research industry-related keywords 

Specific keywords can help you quickly find relevant threads and topics that you can jump into. Google Alerts is a great tool for this. It allows you to track any keyword across all sources that Google tracks (including YouTube), and receive notifications.

7. Watch what your competitors are posting 

Let's face it, you aren't the only one posting to social media. If your competitors are smart, they are as well. You can find out a lot about a competitor by watching what they post. Sharing their latest news, a special offer, a key new hire are all things you can learn from their posts. Keep an eye on their activities and find a smarter way to outdo them. Do they have unanswered questions on an article they posted? Be sure to include these in your posts so you can start an engaging discussion around them.

8. Update your posting calendar 

Reviewing your posting calendar is the last but not least of the daily social media activities you should be doing. You can prioritize your posts by moving them to the most advantageous time slot. 

If you'll notice, nowhere did we discuss your daily post creation and posting onto the channel. The reason for this is that it falls more to a weekly cadence. Your posts are planned, scheduled and created all ahead of their posting date(s). There are platforms that allow you to schedule and create these. You can read more about Creating a Posting Schedule and the specific platforms used.

It's essential to have a prioritized list of your daily social media activities for your business. Following your list and making it a routine as part of your normal business day will give you the results, you're looking for with your social media efforts.

Here is a summary of the daily social media activities you should be doing.

Daily Social Media Activities

1. Check and reply to comments and questions
2. Find your shops mentions online and respond to them.
3. Review and comment on local influencer's posts.
4. Explore industry news and hot topics
5. Research trending hashtags
6. Research industry-related keywords
7. Watch what your competitors are posting
8. Update your posting calendar

Now that you've got a good understanding of the daily social media activities you should be focused on, check out the weekly social media activities article.