Lessons

Lesson Info

What You Need To Sell On Social Media

What you need selling on social media so I for ingredients listed here, and we're going to go through all of this in the next seven, five, four ours however you're going, you're stuck with me the whole day basically, okay, so the first thing you need is a product or at least a product idea that you are going to be selling, so probably for you guys who are already watching me, you probably already have maybe an etsy shop or you you're you're in this, ok, you're not totally new in business. The second really, really important thing that you need is great engagement from your existing audience, so engagement, basically, how are people responding to your current social media posts, for example, on facebook? Are people liking our people sharing in commenting your work? And if they currently are not? I have this amazing system that I'm going to share with you on how you can improve on that. The third thing you need is a relatively large, falling thie key word here is relatively because I kno...

w it really depends on where you're at in your business. If you have maybe one hundred fans, I would say, like, maybe you could probably spend a little bit more time on this section on how to grow your fan base, and I'll talk about that to walk you through how to do that but again relatively it's you know, I wish I could give you fixed answer for how many fans you need to have before you start selling on social media but there's not really a fixed answer to that so I think if you start off with one or two thousand fans that's pretty good when I started selling on social media I only had five thousand fans and I see on lee and it'll some you guys out there like wow five thousand that's a lot, but, um it just depends, okay? So just keep top of mind that as long as you have, as long as you keep building on your audience it's only going to keep getting better. Okay, so you also need a system for collecting payments and managing your orders, so I'll walk you through a couple more than a couple of some of the options that are out there somewhere free somewhere d I y some are paid, so when should we have sales? That's probably one of the first two questions you're thinking about. I'm going to help you choose the time of sales that would be perfect for your audience, but basically what you want to do is to be consistent with your sales times and days, so once we figure when that is for you and your audience, stick with it even if you know I've had customers who have some actually really great customers in the uk, but most of my audience are in america, so I I had my sails on wednesdays every night at seven p m central time, so for the p for the folks in the uk in europe that's like past midnight for them and I have this great customer and she's always asking me like me like, can you do this on a week day on a week end or can you push the time a little forward so I can be on this and I'm just even you know, I really wish I could but the moment that you switch things around, it really changes things for all of your other customers and once you make things a little more unexpected for them, things don't work out as well, so make sure you stick with your timing on def anything you can always add more sales dates and times to your to your calendar, but whatever it is, pick a time stick with it. So in other words, to answer this question, ask yourself, when are your fans most active and engaged on facebook or instagram? So if you're on facebook, what you can do is go to your facebook page and there's kind of, you know you have a cover profile, your cover image on your facebook page and on the bottom right corner. There are these three little dots, as you can see on this screen shot right here, click on that and then you will have this drop down menu and then click on view insights. This is a really great page. If you guys are not familiar with that already, it shows you all of your analytics about who your customers are, how old they are and when they engage twitter polls and how well your poster doing and all that good stuff so go in there and you want to go to insights and then posts so then you're going to get something that looks kind of like this. Your graph is probably gonna look pretty similar, but basically with this information, what you can do then is to target so these are the times that your fans are online, and then you want to choose the time that is kind of the peak winner your fans mostly online. So this is my page and you can kind of see that it's right there so that's around eight or nine pm and then, in terms of the day's friday and saturday do pretty good s o I would choose maybe even saturday, like that's, the top it's pretty even, but I would choose saturday just because the numbers don't lie, so you might as well so then my day would be saturday and I would do in eight to nine pm sale so you can do this for yourself too and check on your own facebook page with that for instagram you can go to this great website it's free for you to use it's called icon of square andi I think I believe it's icon of square dot com but what's really confusing about it that I found anyways once you know you log in you connect your instagram profile to this icon of square service it's kind of confusing to figure out where to find this information so just remember take a note that you want to click on statistics and then click on optimization and then you're going to get this really weird looking blob graph here and this will show you when it's the best time for you to post so you know you can spend the time to read it in to study this thing but long story short what I want you to do is to look at the grey blobs and pick the one that's the largest so I think from for the audience you guys can probably see it you can probably pick it out and focus on that because when I bring up the next light it's not going to be so obvious anymore but it is this little blob right here so so this is friday at about two p m so that's your sale time for instagram, okay, so let's talk about how often you want have tea sales what's realistic for you is a big question that that I would want you to answer for yourself. So when I did a sale a week for the entire year of two thousand fourteen, it was it was crazy. And for every sale I did, I had five products on sale. One of them was especially designed exclusive product that I had just for this social media sale, and it was literally it became a part time job and I didn't have plans, you know, I didn't set out to thousand fourteen thinking that, yeah, this is what I'm going to be doing for the rest of the year. This kind of just fell into my lap when I found out about selling on social media and I started doing it, and then I told my fans that I was doing it a sail one sale every week, and, you know, as I said, stick to it so your fans can trust you, and they know what to expect from you and it's like every so I had a sale on wednesday, and then on monday, I would designed the product, the exclusive product, and I had to make sure it was so much pressure because I had to make sure that this design was good and that I was proud of it, and then that I would be proud to sell it. Basically that on tuesday, I would spend all the time prepping and setting up photos and setting up the sail on the programs that I used for selling on social media. And then wednesday, the actual still happened. But then that left me thursday and friday to kind of just sit in bed all day. So really ask yourself what's realistic for you, you could do a weekly you could dubai weekly could do monthly if I could turn back time or if moving forward, what I would do is probably monthly that will give you good enough a good amount of time to kind of build buzz around your sails, and that would be less pressure on you and less stress for you, too, but essentially will give you more time to really plan your sails out. So you need to have sales frequently enough that your fans are excited that it's coming around. So what I'm going to be teaching you? Actually, I think in the third segment of this workshop is how to build buzz and excitement around your sale this if once you spent all this time marketing your sale people are going to be really excited about what's coming up and then if the knicks so you're doing is two months down down the road you're kind of needing to tell everyone all over again because by that time they would have forgotten that you actually have sales on social media right? So have them frequently enough that its top of mind for your customers on dh that that would work really well but not too frequently that it burns you out or it burns them out so this was actually an issue that I faced was that eventually I could see my sales at the end of the year it's started tapering off it wasn't as good as when I first started out on dh I believe that was because also that it started to lose its novelty or that you know a sale a week is pretty aggressive like you know for most people they get paid once every two weeks so you know you really have to think about your customers as well so what can you sell on social media so a few ideas for you guys who already have your own existing product line you could really think about ways that you can kind of create exclusive products just for social media so limited edition things for you guys out there who are already making one of a kind products perfect that has so and already inbuilt sense of urgency for your customers so limited edition products do really well you can also do pre orders for your new products so if you have something new coming up social media is the best place for you to start drumming up excitement and to get sales for for this new product that you have you could also keep it simple and just sell existing products from your current line. The only thing that I want to mention with that is that if you're doing that you need to give people an incentive and give them a reason to buy during your social media zale because if they can buy it on your regular website are on your on your shop there's not really as big of an incentive for them to be there at seven pm central every wednesday to participate in your sales so normally what I would do if you're doing a sale for your existing product line consider maybe throwing in a little discount maybe free shipping or something like that you could also sell variation so through existing product lines so you know something in different color something in a different size or different material kind of just spinning off what you already have so in that way it's kind of limited edition but it's pretty close to what you already are selling so you don't have to reinvent the wheel in terms of designing your products whatever you decide to sell, what I really recommend for you to do is to create a calendar with all the sale states that you're having. And you know, if you can plan this out ahead in advance, that is, that would really help you avoid the stress and overwhelm. Go back a little bit. S o what's. Best I will recommend for you do have a calendar. Putting your sales dates on all the products that you want to have for sale, putting all the prices. You get us much information, as you can have ready in advance. And that will make your life a lot easier.