The social landscape is changing fast and by the minute. More and more people are on social media and as a result, more businesses jump on board and for good reasons. Sadly, I still hear people complain about it being difficult or too hard to reach their customers.

Firstly, I think we need to get out of the mindset of using social media solely as a selling or client prospect tool. Social media was created to be social and only later was it used as a business tool. Knowing the history and nature of the platform will help you in using it effectively.

The best way to use social media is to build relationships, so rather than seeing it as a ‘sales and marketing’ avenue, maybe rephrase it to ‘relationship building platform’.

To make social media a little bit easier for yourself, why don’t you try this:

1. Be natural

There’s no better way to connect with people than to be you in all your glory. Be you, be natural, be friendly and show that you are a person. Sometimes we are glorifying our lives through amazingly clean pictures on social media, whereas we all know that our kitchens aren’t always shiny and sometimes we have to wrangle the dog and kids whilst trying to pick up the mail.

I’m not saying that we all need to see your kitchen disasters or laundry baskets, but it’s great to see that there are real people behind the brand.

2. Have conversations

When someone posts something on your wall, make sure you acknowledge it with a like or a comment. Additionally, get involved in groups and forums to help those who are seeking advice in the area of your expertise. The more people you help, the more abundance will flow your way plus people will start to take notice and stop by on your page when they see that you post valuable content AND have conversations.

3. Use tools

The biggest struggle for people using social media seems to be that there’s not enough time and there’s too much content to generate. That’s why they’ve created tools that save you time. Look at Edgar, Hootsuite, Buffer, CoSchedule, Social Oomph etc to schedule your social media posts and to Canva or PicMonkey for creating beautiful images. There are numerous tools out there that will make your life easier so make sure you use them.