My Social Media Tracking Sheet on Excel
I’d love to know what sites you like best. For myself, I’ve never been good about using social media and in fact it sort of drives me crazy. I mean, really crazy.
I’m not sure what it is, but Facebook, for instance, doesn’t quite fit the way my mind works. Postings aren’t organized in any way that seems natural to me and I still can’t figure out my way around it from different devices.
But the proverbial “they” say that I really NEED to use social media to market my new business. They being speakers at an SBA (Small Business Administration) event, bloggers who run baking businesses and quite a few others.
So, I’m trying.
The Pros: I’ve reconnected with a college friend I haven’t seen in quite a while, and I’m sort of more aware of what some friends and family members are up to now.
Dancing Bee Baking's FB Page
The Cons: I’m going crazy! And I don’t know how to optimize social media use for my business and it's easy to spend too much time on it, too.
That proverbial “they” also say that I shouldn’t even spend the time on social media unless I have real business objectives for doing so, track what I do and also track the outcomes. So it’s not enough to just post here and there, I have to track activity and results, too! (If that didn’t make total sense, I’d get mad. But it sounds right to me!)
Today one of my main tasks was setting up an Excel spreadsheet to track social media activities and figuring out my objectives. I wrote up some rough objectives, but there’s plenty of room for improvement. The bottom line is to increase sales yet my grand opening is still a few months out, so that’s hard to measure right now. For the time being, I have a target number of posts on each system I’m using, and a goal to connect with a few people who could become customers.
At least it’s a start! If I were a business teacher, I’d probably give myself a “C” grade for this, but it’s all good- it’s a work in progress!
Great news, though. There’s been a side benefit to my struggle with social media. In the course of setting up Facebook for Dancing Bee Baking, I found a very special group called Baking Business Confidence. It’s a group for people starting up and running baking businesses and the group is interesting, supportive and helpful. I’m leaning a lot about the business side of baking, getting acquainted with people in various stages of doing what I’m trying to do and the members of the group are so helpful I’m in awe! What a pleasant and useful surprise.
Note: If you’re running or starting a baking business and are interested in this group, let me know through the contact form on this blog and I’ll get in touch with you to share more information about the group.
Back to the start of this blog, I would love to hear from you which social media platform you like best! Do you use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, G+, Instagram? Leave a comment to let me know, ok?
Thanks,
Diana
PS- Just finished testing royal icing made with 3 different brands of meringue powder. Now, that was fun! And I know which I think is best (and worst)!
Testing 3 different meringue powders for Royal Icing
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