7 Social Media Marketing Tips Every Freelancer Must Follow

Let me share the 7 social media marketing tips that every freelancer should follow.

Every business needs to be on social media and freelancing is no different. Every freelancer should consider social media for sure. It isn’t something that freelancers can avoid or should avoid.

Social Media can provide leads, clients, customers, reviews. More than anything, it is one of those social proof to build trust.  So let me share how these 7 simple changes to your social media marketing tips that can help grow you as a freelancer.

1. Engage with Local Followers

The best social media marketing tips is to create engagement. The success of any social media marketing depends on how well you engage with your audience.

Use social media to find and engage with people around you. This can help you meet new people and interact with them. Organize meet up, giveaways, and events. I know many local people who started selling some stuff to their friends on social media and slowly it has given them ideas of what people are looking to buy and have made a complete business out of it.

You may be wondering how to get these local and yet loyal followers? Be part of the groups and communities on social media which are for your local city or state or try to create some events or competition. Competition always works and people winning can share on social media giving you more promotion.

Engage with them to let the relationship grow. This will strengthen the relationship between you and your potential customer. As a result, it may lead to loyalty, brand visibility, and at times even referrals as clients for you.

2. $1 per day can take you a long way

Freelancing is not a job and so consider it as a business. Don’t feel discouraged when what you share on social media isn’t getting the eyeballs that you think it deserves.

A small budget can drive huge results when it comes to social media. As low as $1 daily budget can do wonders on social media. When you consider freelancing as a business, it can always afford $1 per day for personal branding.

There is so much you can do with $1 per day

1. Boost your updates on Facebook
2. Get more likes on your Facebook page
3. Advertise your YouTube videos
4. Get traffic to your site’s landing page
5. Get more twitter followers
6. More Instagram followers

The list is endless. Just make a budget of $1 per day for a social media marketing campaign.

3. Don’t try to be everywhere

A freelancer can earn more money but they have limited time and social media can be a time killer.

You don’t need to be on every social media platform possible. It is better to be on a few social media platform but if it is something that becomes too much for you, even just one platform is enough. The choice of your platform is not entirely based on your comfort but it also is a platform where you can focus on getting more clients in the future.

If I have to choose only one platform, it can be either Facebook or LinkedIn for freelancing. Again this is not a general rule and you can choose any other as well but choose the one you find comfortable using and can find potential clients.

4. Consistent Social Media Profile

The cover photo and profile pictures of the social media account play a great role in branding. You must not only choose the right headshot but should also be consistent across platforms.

Try to use the same username. My always first choice of username is shabbirbhimani. Similarly, you will see my same photo on all my online profiles – be it my Gravatar, Facebook, or Twitter, or even on Upwork or on Quora or Reddit.

Use the same picture on all your social media accounts, pages, and communities so that your followers can recognize you on other platforms.

5. Use of Right Tools

You don’t want to be wasting too much time on social media. If you don’t use the right kind of social media tools, it can mean you end up doing too much on social media for too little benefits.

As an example, if you wish to consistently interact with your followers on social media or want to be an active member of a Facebook group, it can require too much of an effort from you.

As an individual, doing freelancing, it can be a time-consuming task.

So one has to strike the balance between using the right tools to keep engagement flowing on social media as well as not waste too much time doing it.

6. Ask friends to share

People write good content but often feel shy or lack the confidence to share it on their personal social media profiles. If you don’t like to share your own content, how can you expect it from others? You should be able to share your content on your personal social media profile as well.

Once you are able to share it on social media, you can ask your friends to share. If they have missed it, ask them their views about the content. Let them comment on it more freely and engage with it.

The increase in the engagement to every content shared helps catch more eyeballs on social media.

7. Follow the Pareto Principle

Too much self-promotion on social media will have an adverse effect on your profile and can reduce the influence and reach of your shares. Various experimentation has been done about it and the best that works is the Pareto principle or 80:20 rule or rather 4:1 rule.

The 4:1 rule means that for every promotion, share 4 non-promoting content.

There is no limit to what you can share as non-promoting content. Anything and everything like images, videos, good quotes, views on any topic, reshare of other people’s content, comments on some updates from people, or just updates about your current activity.

It helps to build more relationships with those who follow you and makes them feel you are just not pushing them to buy your product but also interacting and helping them know about the industry in general.

The most influential social media marketing experts follow the same technique to gain consistent engagement of followers.

Common Social Media Mistakes

Finally, I will share the common social media mistakes as a part of the social media marketing tips.

• Ignore online reputation – When it comes to social Media Marketing it’s always your online reputation that will work. It is sum total of all your social media profiles along with the good and bad reputation that you may have earned over the years.
• Not building an online presence – If you are doing social media marketing just for some quick traffic then it is high time to forget it. Social media traffic can give some good stats in your analytics, it’s always good to have a go at long term goals and concentrate more on conversion.
• Not focusing on relationships – Social Marketing is all about relationships. So you should focus more on making friends rather than generating sales and promoting your business.
• Not updating regularly – Make your social media presence felt with regular updates. One doesn’t need to be on every social media platform and update each of them but what I mean is choose one or two which suits you and try to be the person that people want to connect with.