Lucy Kippist:

Michelle, it was fascinating to hear you raise the stats around the access to social media in that small business space. I think you said 300 million people accessing all various forms of social media. And the question I have for you about that then is, what would your tip be to someone here in Australia, a business owning woman, utilising any form of social media?

Michelle Klein :

It's 300 million businesses and there are something like three and a half billion people on those platforms. So, the size is significant. A lot, yeah, everyone almost, and which has its own challenges and opportunities. But it is overwhelming. It's the right question, because it's where do I start? So, we had a programme that was called the Boost Leaders Network or Boost with Facebook at the time, Meta Boost now. And we would go around the world, we did it here in Australia in quite a few places, and we would actually did it in Byron and all sorts of communities and brought people together and offered free training and advice. And it wasn't just Facebook and Meta, it was Amazon Web Services, and it was advice on how to run a payroll or what to look for as an employee, or if you need legal advice. So, we'd bring in quite a lot of people and make it as rounded as possible so that you could...

It wasn't a one-stop shop, but at least you could get some advice generally, and then narrow in a little bit more on the social and digital side. And I would say, so first of all, these platforms, whether it's Google, whether it's Facebook, whether it's Instagram, they have very rich reporting tools. The best way to build a community quickly and to get attention for your product is through advertising and search engine marketing. It's a quick way to do it. Be as fastidious, because you will be, because it's your money on the results. And you have the ability in the system to actually adjust the tools and make sure that you're optimising for those results. And so, start small. Do a few tests, play around with the different technology, and then see what's working best and then pivot the money in that direction or pivot the effort in that direction.

The other thing is, certainly on Facebook groups, there are tonnes of small business communities. And small businesses love peer to peer networking, because you don't have the ability to just bounce an idea off someone in a different part of department, for example. So, really sign up for those. And I can find some links and make sure that they get shared with this podcast. But that's a great way to ask questions. So, in our Boost Leaders Network, we would see the amount of amazing... I learned in there years ago that Canva was this incredible platform to make your content look great. And so, we did a partnership with Canva. They came on some of the training with us. And so, there's just lots of sharing that goes on. So, I would look at my month and decide how many hours a month am I going to spend educating myself on what's out there and then running a couple of tests, but making sure that I've got enough space to then measure the effectiveness and then make adjustments from there.

‍

Lucy Kippist:

Carrying on from that point, we are a community of business owning women, but a really large number of those women are running businesses for women. Either they've found a problem that they experienced that they want to help someone else with or they've invented a solution to something in another way. So, for you personally, just in terms of being marketed to as a woman in the commercial space, do you find it easy to separate your business identity from your personal identity online? How do you feel about doing business on social media? Do you have two distinct personalities? Are you Michelle work and Michelle at home? And how can we leverage your experience for our community in terms of giving them some advice?

Michelle Klein:

So, if you're the founder of a company, you're going to have a company profile, you're going to have if you want your profile to be public. And then you might have, then you think about your channel mix. So, for example, a lot of owners who are founder led, so their name is attached to the company itself, tend to have... Instagram is the open channel for everybody to follow, Twitter or X might've been the other one. So, everyone can follow there. And that's very much a content strategy with a business angle to it, nothing personal. And you can also set up a business account obviously on these channels. And then you have your personal account. I tend to use Facebook as personal only, although I have a public profile, because that's where when I lived in America was my channel for connecting with my family and keeping it more personal.

Now, you can set up a business account. And then in your dashboard on all of these social media or digital channels, you can actually see all the different things that you're doing and you can toggle between your profiles. So, I tend to keep them separate, because if on one hand you're posting pictures of your children, you might not want that to be broadcast to the community. It might be part of your strategy, but if so, then it's got to be really thoughtful and part of your content calendar. So, having a content calendar ultimately is what I'm saying, and then overlaying the channel strategy on top of that is a second piece.

‍