Social media marketing can be daunting for any small business. And no matter what business you’re in you need to focus on running all of the facets of it, right? The social stuff is yet another thing you need to give focus to and it’s another thing you don’t have time for.

So here at Dasheroo you know we like to share our trials and tribulations with you as we’re starting out a new company and everything fresh. So we decided to tell you how we spun up our social media, which accounts for 25% of our overall traffic.

So without further adieu, here’s how we do it. Take from it what you wish.

Start With Your Content

For our platform we chose WordPress. We blog short articles, long how-to articles and some fun content as well with our weekly Who Charted? series. Either way we make sure that almost every day there is a piece of content out on our blog with our keywords placed into every post. Google loves it and it gives us some great content to share on social media. And since we didn’t have a ton of content to put on our site, this was a great way to start to get noticed by search engines for our related keywords.

Pick Your First Social Network

We chose Facebook. Every time we published to our blog we published the link to Facebook. And since we were on Facebook first we invited all of our friends to like the page. We run an ad campaign for likes on Facebook so that when we were ready to announce our Alpha and Beta versions of Dasheroo, our Facebook fans would have first dibs. Nine months later we have over 12,500 fans and continue to post, run ads and grow. Facebook is our number one source of traffic at Dasheroo, currently at 12% of all traffic.

Add Another and Another

Twitter – Once we had Facebook figured out our next social network was Twitter, we made sure that John (@therealhingley) had his own Twitter account separate from @GetDasheroo and we posted our blog content to both Twitter accounts. We realized that only posting once per day on Twitter wouldn’t move the needle, the life of a Tweet is only a few minutes these days so we would have to post 4-5 times per day at least to get noticed. That’s a lot. Once we started to post more often now 4% of our overall traffic comes from Twitter, up from 2.5%.

Linkedin – Linkedin was our next social network we chose and we share the daily posts to John’s Linkedin page. Our company page doesn’t get much traction yet but hopefully will soon. We’d rather use the thousand or so of John’s contacts to leverage our content. And Linkedin doesn’t seem like the proper medium to share posts like you would on Twitter, over and over so we only really share “new” content on Linkedin. Linkedin holds steady at 3% of traffic.

Pinterest – What the heck is a business dashboard startup doing on Pinterest? Well, Pinterest was opportunistic for us. We don’t have a lot of followers but every time we post an image to the blog we pin it on a board we created. For instance every Sunday we do a funny charts series entitled “Who Charted?” so we thought it was appropriate to pin the funny charts here. Pinterest hangs in there at about .5% of traffic. Not bad for just pinning images to a board!

Instagram – Instagram was next on deck. Once we had Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Pinterest going (we also added the “follow” images to our site and our email marketing campaigns) we thought it might be somewhat trivial to post a picture on Instagram. Side benefit? We also get to post this content automagically to Facebook and Twitter!

Google+ was the last one we looked at. Should it have been higher on the list? Perhaps, since creating a profile on Google+ boosts your search engine rankings. Not only that but every time a reader clicks the +1 button on one of your blog posts or Google+ posts, it increases your standing with Google.

Whew this is getting time consuming isn’t it? And this took months and months to get rolling! For each new social network we gave it a solid month before we really launched another one.

Automate!

So the first thing we did was look at a way to automate this as much as humanly possible.

But how?

It took us to launch Twitter in order for us to think we had to automate. Posting over 5 times a day without automation can get tricky!

Every time we publish our WordPress blog we make sure that within WP our content gets published to Facebook and Twitter.

For Twitter we use Hootsuite but you can also check out Buffer. We keep a running list of our blog article headlines, with columns for the date and time we want them published as well as the link in a google spreadsheet. We make sure that we repeat these articles every few days in the spreadsheet so that in the event someone misses it on Twitter, they’ll see it again at a later date. We upload that into Hootsuite and voila, our Twitter is automated for the month. We try to make sure it’s always “evergreen” content and not date specific.

After we had Twitter up and running we added Linkedin and Google+ so that when we do our daily posting we can post from Hootsuite just once to most of our social networks.

So even though we know we want to RT other Tweets or Tweet interesting articles we read we’re always reusing our own content since we put so much time into creating it.

Measure

We’re always looking to see what works best! Using Dasheroo we can see that Facebook is driving the most social traffic for us, we can see that the infographic about dog breeds is hugely popular on the blog and we can see that Linkedin comes in 3rd for overall social media, especially when we share a bunch of articles. Hootsuite has analytics if you’re publishing from there as does Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Pinterest, however Dasheroo brings many of your apps together into one business dashboard.

There you have it, start small and grow as you have the time to grow.