Social media was intended as a means to connect and communicate with your friends and family. It barely is that now. If you know the online marketing world, you know that social media is another space in which you can invest money and time in and expect many returns.
As a freelancer, however, it does not seem too much of a bother to you. After all, what would social media bring to your business interest?
A LOT! That’s the answer.
You may be a freelancer, but if you haven’t used social media to your benefit yet, you are passing on an excellent opportunity to grow your business.
In other words, you are leaving money on a table that you already eat.
Yes, you already know how to use social media to make some money; you just never thought of doing so.
Here, I will outline how to use social media to make money. You will learn how to make money directly and indirectly through social media.
I will not go through every social media platform. Still, the techniques can be adjusted to LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and any other platform you like to use.
Adaptability is key, especially in the online marketing world.
So, let us begin.
Choose one or two platforms you will be most active on
You can be active on every platform, but that does not mean you should do it. It will suck the time out of your life, and you probably won’t have as much to show for it.
You should instead figure out which platform you like using the most, understand its features, and it must have the potential to find your prospective clients and make money.
If you are targeting companies and big brands, Twitter and LinkedIn are where you would find the most active.
LinkedIn is for the almost-strictly professional. CEOs, managers, and top-level personnel use LinkedIn as a way to connect and network with one another.
If your clientele includes small business owners and young entrepreneurs, they will likely use Twitter and Facebook. They like to be more social than big brands.
Depending on your niche and clientele, the platform you should use differs most.
Optimize your profile and feed
Once you have decided which platform to use, you should ensure all your contact information is accurate. Edit your profile to include as much information as possible about what you can offer.
There is a strong chance a potential client will check your profile, at least to find your contact info. While they are there, they may want to see what you spend your time doing on social media.
If you strictly use a platform for business, you should keep it like that.
Be active with community members, share relevant articles, and follow influencers. Be an average person using the platform while keeping every action relevant both to you and your potential client.
Now that you have your accounts set up, you can start working your way to earning more money.
Most of what you have to do concerns personal branding and effective outreach strategies.
These are the five best and easy ways to use social media for your benefit.
1. Sharing more relevant content
As mentioned above, you need to keep the content you share more relevant to your business and your clients.
If you know who your clients are, you know what content they like to read and what content they would benefit from.
It could be content published on your blog (although it shouldn’t be exclusively yours) or content you consider worth sharing.
Your potential client will likely judge you based on what you read and promote. If you write and share helpful and productive content, you have more chances of attracting new leads.
If you share everything you come across, regardless of the content’s accuracy and/or quality, you will push away your clients.
You can use post-schedulers to keep your profile active while completing your work. You don’t have to be active always, but you should make it so that your account is.
Schedule about five posts per day for each platform that you use. Sooner or later, that would bring in more visitors. More visitors mean more money.
2. Engage with the community
Whichever platform you use, you should communicate with the community. If not, don’t even think about making money through those platforms. On Twitter, you can use #TwitterChats around your niche. Most of the time, you will find like-minded people answering industry questions.
Prospective clients may be reading or answering questions as well. You can even hijack a chat and present yourself as an expert in the area you are in.
On Facebook, many groups have thousands of members asking questions daily and waiting for someone to give them legitimate answers. You will grow your influence network if you engage with a few of them daily. You may unintentionally convince someone to hire you if it means you can do the job better than they can.
Or you can use Quora to answer questions directly. I love using that platform as the algorithm promotes your answers to potential customers. You just need to answer the most relevant questions with as much detail as possible.
3. Conduct interviews
One way many successful people gain more popularity is through interviews. Many freelancers can attract new clients thanks to the “Live” feature on almost all platforms today. You can invite people of interest to your “show” and have a live discussion with them about a particular topic.
But that’s not all.
You do not have to be the interviewer all the time. Instead, you can also be the interviewee. And sometimes you should also try to be a guest on other people’s shows.
Presenting yourself as the expert or the specialist is always better. It’ll definitely increase your potential to make more money as a freelancer.
Pro tip: Interviews don’t always have to be live. You can conduct written interviews if you are uncomfortable putting yourself out there. Many bloggers already do it.
4. Be personal, authentic, and consistent
As a freelancer, you are always selling yourself. That’s the primary product you must sell; everything else is incidental. So, if you want to make more money as a freelancer, you must show personality throughout your posts.
There are many articles on how personalization of your pieces and outreach emails can help increase your chances of securing leads. There are not as many recommending you to do the same on your social media.
Many fall into the category of those sharing content impersonally. They just hit share and leave it as it is. While that is time-saving, it is not showing your personality at all. Your social media posts should have a part of you that stands out.
Authenticity means creating something out of nothing. It is practically impossible to achieve that. But it simply means writing your posts in your own voice.
Not only so, but you should keep a consistent personality throughout your platforms. It would seem incredibly dishonest (and spammy) if a prospective client finds that you speak in two different voices depending on the platform.
5. Contact your clients
You may wonder why this is not the first tip on this list. Well, it is because unless you have made sure that your personal brand on social media is well-presented, you should not reach out to your clients.
But since I can assume you’ve got that handled by this point, it is time for you to reach out to your clients directly.
Emails are OK, but not everyone responds. But if you can comment on someone’s post, retweet them, or talk to them directly, you are already a step toward your end.
Contacting someone for business reasons is intrusive. Doing it improperly would give them a wrong impression of how you conduct business.
Always ask permission to discuss a business opportunity if you have talked before or are about to speak to them for the first time. Allow them the chance to decline or schedule a call at a later time that is more convenient for them.
If you have your personal brand all set up, they will surely click to check your profile. If they like what they see, you will indeed be granted a chance.
Conclusion
Social media is for connecting with others, but that does not exclude conducting and growing your freelance business. In fact, social media could possibly be your best option for finding more clients (high-paying clients even) since you already stand out from the crowd.
You should be careful, though.
Giving the wrong impression will result in losing the client and anyone who may be connected to them.
Let me know how you make money from social media in the comments below.
Note: Please PIN the image below.
This is a guest post by Youness Bermime. You can read more of his content on ActionTakingBlogger or follow him on Twitter. If you would like to write a guest post for Daglega, please contact us.
Great tips, Youness. I love this post because it highlights the main points on how to leverage social media. The concept of being active and consistent is a remarkable way to grow your business and make money. The more active and consistent you are on social media, the more trust you build with your target market. And when they trust you, they will be easily converted to leads.
Thanks for sharing.
Hi Moss,
Thank you for your comment. You are right. With consistency, you have more luck getting more leads and clients. Many forget about this quality and fail to scale their business.
Hello Youness,
Really great advice, I think Social Media plays a very important role in the growth of any online venture.
Other day I was reading a post on Reddit and How a lady earned over $10k with her blog.
She later revealed that, Pinterest was the biggest source of traffic after Google.
I have started giving more attention toward pinterest and it is starting to show now.
Thanks for the amazing post.
Keep up the good work :)
Hi Bhawna,
Yes, Pinterest is proven to be one of the best sources of traffic for blogs. I use it regularly to drive traffic as well. In fact, it is the lead source of traffic in the first few weeks of my blog launches. I only start getting Google traffic after a few months.
Thank you for your comment.
Hello there,
Really amazing post,
I have a question though.
We have a page on Facebook and we had boosted some post in the past and now it has almost 3.9K likes ( All purchased from FB Ads)
but the problem is, whenever we post something on it. Engagement is very low. we get like 10-15 likes.
What can we do to increase the engagement?
Any suggestion would be helpful,
Hi there,
Good question. Usually, Facebook boost don’t bring reliable traffic unless your targetting was on point. I would suggest creating a group and make your page an admin of it. Because of the change Facebook administered earlier this year, all pages are seeing way less engagement than before, but groups are growing every day.
Thank you for the question.
Hi Youness Bermime
The great idea to understand how to use social media to make money, keep adding to the latest ideas in it.
thanks
Hey Meenakshi,
Glad it helped. We update our articles regularly. So, I hope you’ll check back sometimes. Thank you very much for stopping by and commenting.
You’ve a masterpiece here, Youness.
You were very correct when you talked about picking a couple of platforms one has to be more active on.
For me, I choose 3: Facebook, Twitter and IG. I’m not too active on LinkedIn. Recently, I have added, Reddit and Quora because of the volume of traffic I get from them.
Thanks for this amazing piece. I practice them often.
Keep it up.
Emenike
Hey Emenike,
Sorry for the delay and thank you very much for stopping by and commenting. Yes, of course, Quora is one of the best ways to increase quality traffic to blogs. I’m glad you have identified Quora as a great traffic tool.
I will forward this comment to Youness.
Thanks again.