Increasing your web presence with Social Media

Now in this video, we are going to have a brief look at social media. Now social media is a massive, massive subject. But social media can be a very good way of you getting a bigger web presence and also getting more stories out and linking and gaining more new customers. So what we're going to do is go through our basic social media accounts. So the thing with all of these accounts is if you follow them and you share stories on them, then you can quite easily build up your own social media presence. And also by looking at who follows our accounts, you can then access through to increase your following as well.

So the first account we're going to look at is LinkedIn. Now LinkedIn's a very good business based website, it's very good for getting more customers. Now, to start with, you can follow people through with follow me, follow our company as well. So there are different areas, there are your personal page and your business pages. So your personal page will have all your information and stories, but also if you create a page for your own business, then that can start to grow as well over time.

So if you look here, this is our ProTrainings Online course. So here we can put stories on there, the facts, examples here where we've put Polish student manuals on, a new course of major incident trauma. So the stories are there. People can like them. People can follow them. People can comment on them. So it's very good if you start interacting with our pages, which will then help your site as well and again, get the information over and like them. If you got any good stories from yours let me know. We can get it added to our LinkedIn and link back to you, which will then increase your site.

And the second one we're going to look at now is Facebook. A lot of you know Facebook just for your personal side, but also you can set up a page with it and with the Facebook Pages then you can make one of those for your business. It can be branded to your business and then you can put the news on there. The news is stuff you are doing, new stuff within first aid or teaching that you are working with. But also share some of our stuff. So, you see a story on our site, share it on your page. It's quite an easy way of keeping content going because if you put a story on Facebook it quite quickly can then get circulated around a lot of people and that way more and more people know that you exist. So this example here, we've got different stories here, we've got video content on the site as well, and the individual stories. So what we would do is we'd put some videos on there, we'd put some standard text stories or other news.

But also, this is where you can send us stories. So you send us a story through and then we can put it on our Facebook page. Some of them are we sort of built up over the years, lots of different information. The other thing on here it tells you has your business address and has other information.

Now you can take this to whatever level you want but with ours we take. Up there we have different phone numbers so we can actually track any inbound phone calls or inbound comments back from the websites. We actually have different phone numbers for our social media as our normal. You don't need to go down that route. You can just keep a standard number and make sure that people will then contact you. And with Facebook as well they can message you directly. This is a good thing to have. So on your normal Facebook messenger, you might have your customers start contacting you, which means if you get back to them quickly, you are more likely to get that sale.

Now, Twitter is something that some people don't always understand. Thing with Twitter is it's much shorter messages, but the key things with Twitter when you are using those, is you can retweet stuff on ours or other sites, but you must make sure if you are putting new posts on, make sure that you have good content in the 140 characters you are allowed, but also put web links in there. You can shorten those, but the key other thing is pictures. If somebody hasn't got a picture, same with Facebook, and LinkedIn, if you don't have a picture with the post, it's more likely just to be ignored by people and move on. But if you can get good pictures... So if you wanna put a tweet out about a course you just taught and you got a picture of lots of happy people there around their mannequins or things, that's ideal. Just make sure you are allowed to use that picture.

So, all social media, using pictures is really, really great. On the subject of being allowed to use pictures, be very careful you don't just take pictures off Google and then recirculate them on blogs, on Facebook, on LinkedIn because if you don't have the rights to circulate that picture, then you got problems. Then if you just share a picture, in other words using their post on yours that's fine. If you take a picture from Google Images and then you put that in the post, then you may well find if someone notices what you are doing, you can get fined. And the fines on those can be quite high to the tune of £500 to £2000 per image and sometimes more, so be very careful that you own every picture and you have permission to use it.

So with our Twitter account, you can see there that the followers on that side but also the individual stories. We see as we've got pictures on the page, it makes it much easier. We've got one post here, we haven't got a picture, it's on Public Health England, it just doesn't stand out so well. Now where we buy these images from, you see about anaphylaxis images in there, we use Shutterstock for those at shutterstock.com. It's a very good easy way of getting pictures, but they're not cheap. We have a subscription to them so we can get pictures at quite a lot on a high volume. But look at that, if you want a nice picture, there's somewhere you can buy that picture from, and then you can use it on multiple posts, at most multiple websites.

The final site we're going to look at in social media is YouTube. So a lot of you might have YouTube accounts in your own right, set one up for your business. With that, you can start sharing videos on our system. So if you haven't got video content yourself, then just go onto our system and then share those videos onto your site. So very quickly if you take a lot of our videos, you'll very quickly build up a training YouTube channel with all the information you are likely to need. So we go down here, you can see we can also create playlists and things like this, but you'll see the different sort of groups of videos that can be there. So definitely, YouTube is something worth having.

Now as far as actually publicizing your courses, we've spoken on other videos about procourses.co.uk which is our course finder website. If you publish a video... Sorry if you publish a course on our system, if you see up here, there's social media link. So this course here is the most you first had at work course and there's a tweet button and a Facebook share button. If you click those buttons, what that'll do is then that will circulate it through on your Facebook. So you list a course on our system, and then you tweet it out and you put it on your Facebook. It's a very easy way of taking all that content and putting it straight out on your Facebook page. So you can quite easily tell your customers and your followers what courses that you've got running. And you can do that as many times as you want. But be very careful not to just keep on doing it. People don't wanna know every single morning that you are running a course next month.

So just use it sparingly. But try and mix that with other posts so people know what's going on. The key thing about using these is they'll link that back to your page on ProCourses and then they can just go on there and you see here's a reserve button, people can directly book on your course. So that way, that the course that you've got listed you've got online bookings for.

Just finally, while we're on this page, if you just look down on this, you see these ratings, but also down here on ProCourses, you've got your testimonials. These are the things that people say about your courses that you are running. Now you can also take those, cut and paste them, and put those onto your website, onto your blog, or onto your social media pages. So it just gives people a real impression of how good you are as a trainer, and you can actually pop that information straight on. You can even link directly to it from your social media straight back to this page. So it proves those feedback about you has been left is genuine.