#62 - How S-O-C-I-A-L Are You? - Heather Heuman with Sweet Tea Social Marketing

Ministry At Scale

Heather Heuman got her start in the digital marketing space 22 years ago. After working as a special education teacher, she switched career paths and began work at a digital marketing firm. After beginning a business of her own, she began to grow that business using her digital marketing experience and started helping other businesses do the same. For the past 7 years she has been helping businesses grow using social media with her digital marketing firm called Sweet Tea Social Marketing.

In this interview, Heather shares about how you can do social media well and how can you use it to assist your business or clients. Heather uses the acronym S.O.C.I.A.L. to help her clients grow their businesses and organizations.

Strong Foundation

Who are you, who do you help, and what do you do? These are the foundational questions to ask when synthesizing your organization’s core beliefs. Think about it like this: if you were brought onto your local news station representing your business, what’s the one thing that will be listed on the screen underneath your organization’s name? In five words or less, it should explain who you are and what you do. If this strong foundation is not clear, it makes everything else on social media much more difficult.

Optimize Relationships

Relationship building can really make businesses stand out. Reaching out and making connections, even digitally, is a great way to build relationships on social media and connect with people in your industry. Many people think of social media as a feed curated for themselves, but it can be a great way to cultivate relationships and make connections.

Choose the Right Platforms

Spreading out your content across many social media platforms is usually not the best strategy. While it’s important to not put all your eggs in one basket, it’s best to identify which platforms you get the most engagement on and focus your time and energy on those platforms that are working. It’s more valuable to emphasize quality content on fewer platforms, than to publish mediocre content on many platforms. Pick your top two platforms and spend 80% of your time on those platforms, spending your remaining time on the other platforms.

Influential Content

You need to be adding content that adds value to the conversation. It’s important to be adding your genuine thoughts on things as well. Don’t share sensationalized content for the sake of getting engagement and attention, but don’t be afraid to add your opinion and thoughts into your messaging. If you want to amplify what your organization thinks and stands for, you need to add something personal rather than simply following the crowd and sharing what everyone else is sharing.

Automation and Smart Systems

Rather than trying to figure out what to post day by day, scheduling out your posts can save time and energy. It’s also important to be interacting with commentors or posting extra content on top of the scheduled posts so it doesn’t seem like the business is completely hands off. Work smarter, not harder, and don’t complicate things that don’t need to be made more difficult. This may mean sitting down and scheduling out a bunch of posts for the following month or setting aside some time to film 5 pieces of content at once, and schedule them all out for the future. Just remember that organic content is equally as important as scheduled and automated content.

Legacy and Kingdom Impact

If you can focus on communicating in a way that will help humanity or work to make the planet a better place, it can create more passion for what you are doing among your team. If you are not a faith-based organization, are you creating a legacy? If you are a faith-based organization, is your social media presence having a Kingdom impact?

To hear more in-depth information from Heather about how you can use social media, check out the full interview on episode #62 of the Ministry at Scale podcast.