examples of personal essay.

If you follow my column, you’d know I said I’d there’d be a “How the Moscow police mistook me for a prostitute” story time today. But alas, something bigger was hogging my attention this week.  It’s been on my mind for month actually. So let’s bookmark?

Social media management. Wow. Coming from a place where almost every service provider/product has an active to-the-point page, that remains current, aesthetically pleasing and informative – it annoys me when people leave out or underutilise platforms like Instagram here. Do you know there are more than 209,900 active Instagram users in Namibia? People aged 25 – 34 taking up the bulk of that number. Facebook has 592,500 of us on there. All potential supporters, clients and customers. And yet so many can’t be bothered to join the movement. I think you’re doing yourself a disservice to be honest.

Obviously, you’re busy trying to run your businesses and don’t always have the time to manage your social media accounts and maintain your presence (WHICH IS EVERYTHING!) And not everyone is a creative enough to put out things that would grasp their target market. There’s nothing worse than searching for something online and finding some self-generated page that was last posted on in 2014. Or finding posts and links that are all over the place and don’t stick to what the page is about. There needs to be a system here. This goes for our local entrepreneurs, influencers, doctors, online shops, schools/institutions and even personal accounts.

I’ve decided to embark on becoming a social media curator – fixing the social medias of Namibians one page at a page. I’m going to publish a new page showcasing what I mean in the coming weeks.

But for now, here are 3 tips to start if you want to give your page a makeover – even if it’s just your personal page you want to grow. Naturally, if you don’t mind staying hidden and inaccessible, this isn’t for you.

  1. PLAN YOUR POSTS AHEAD OF TIME

The reason is, being the busy person you are, you may forget to post regularly which will make your loyal followers forget about you. I like an app called Later. You compile your posts ahead of time, set the days and times you’d like them to appear and it reminds you to just click the “post” button when the time comes.

 

  1. #HASHTAGS – YOU GET 30!

Including a hashtag with your posts helps to categorize content for your audience. From a user perspective, hashtags allow us to find posts that are relevant to our interests and interact with other social media users. From a business perspective, it is your chance to be noticed in such conversation and establish your company as a voice for certain topics. When I’m hunting for a therapist, I expect to see something under “namibianpsychologist” or “windhoekpsychologist”. So if you make lotions, you might add: #namibianskincare, #namibianlotion, #namibianbeautyproducts, #skincareblogger, #namibianbeauty, #namibiancosmetics, #skincarelover, #naturalskincare, #windhoekskincare. Milk that shit!  Mix it up with very popular hashtags and also a few unique ones that only you might have. For example, I realised that there’s one hashtag on the WHOLE of Instagram that no one’s ever used but me. Meaning that when anyone looks that hashtag up, my content will be the only thing they see for miles to come– at least up until someone catches on and starts riding my train.

 

  1. SHARE YOUR PROCESS

We want to know why you started and why we should follow you. Make yourself more relatable. You’re not just going to keep bombarding us with filtered selfies that are repetitive with no caption and expect us to fall in love with that. If you’re not Betty Davids, sit down and think of something useful to share. Ultimately, we are selfish, we want to know what it is we can get from you.


 

Follow Saron on Instagram

Write A Comment