OK, so what is wrong with a tweet like this:

@ClairCFAR Happy #Monday. I’d love to #promote by #beauty #business in #Nottingham

#salon #massage #nails #facial #eastmidlands?

Firstly, it’s quite difficult to read, no? All those hashtags are getting in the blinking way, infact they are making me blink to adjust my eyes to what the message is trying to say. Secondly, there’s no need for all of those hashtags!

So what is a hashtag? Years ago (i may be showing my age) the hashtag symbol was used before a number to denote the word ‘number’. Telephone number would be written as Telephone #. It was a short cut I guess and I believe that’s why there is still so much confusion surrounding the small # symbol.

Nowadays, this simple stamp is a way of communicating effectively through social media. However, as with many things in life, each social media platform has it’s own set of ‘rules’ for how effective the hashtag will be against their ever changing algorithms. The first things to consider is that the hashtag is a way of communicating a topic of interest to your audience. You must consider what your audience might be searching for so that you can show up in their results.

If you are in the beauty industry, you may want to refine your hashtags to be more specific to what you offer for example – it could be eyelash tinting, intimate waxing, rather than the rather large subject of beauty. Similarly, for those in the fitness industry you should consider drilling further down into the industry and the classes / services you offer and both of these examples should include a location hashtag unless you can go worldwide with your business.

In the example tweet above, there were far too many hashtags used. But unless you are ‘in the know’ you aren’t going to know that! But now you know, so no excuses! To make your tweets more legible for your audience on Twitter, good form would be to include 2 -3 relevant hashtags, no more than 4!

Now to confuse people, especially if you link all of your Social Media accounts together, Facebook doesn’t really do hashtags. Well, it does but no-one uses FB to search for things using hashtags. Where as on Instagram you can use a shit ton of hashtags, up to 30!

This is where you need to be careful, if you have your Twitter or Instagram hooked up to your Facebook to post automatically (and  this is a whole other blogs post!), and you are using these posts for business, you might end up looking a bit like a numpty who doesn’t know what they are doing. if you are comfortable going in and editing after they’ve posted to take out the not need hashtags then great. But if you aren’t up to speed on all of that, then please unlink your accounts for now!

Back to Instagram, you can use up to 30 hashtags but rather than putting them all in your initial post or comment, post them all in the second or 3rd comment. Again it’s much more pleasing on the eye for the reader and the Insta algorithms seem to favour this approach too. Check out what I mean on my Insta account.

Is the above clear?

Twitter – preferably 2 or 3 hashtags, no more than 4

Facebook – none

Instagram – up to 30

Struggling with which hashtags to use?  There’s a great site called Hashtagify.me which will let you pop in one hashtag and show you a plethora of linked hashtags that you can use for your business. How cool is that!

If this was helpful for you at all, please share it with those who you see struggling!

If you would like any more tips on maximising Twitter for your business, BOOK IN NOW FOR YOUR MAXIMISING TWITTER FOR BUSINESS SESSION

You’ve been running your business for a while now right? Your turnover has been up and down over the last few months or years, but what you’re doing is what you know works. I get it, a campaign you ran last year successfully just didn’t cut the mustard this year. Those around you are seemingly nailing every angle of their business, they are the epitome of ‘busy-ness’. You are projecting the same image but deep down you have the sinking feeling that something just isn’t quite right.

What you aren’t seeing is that those successful people around you, are often having those same niggling doubts about themselves. It’s completely normal. Those feelings of ‘I fear being successful’ to ‘I can’t do this, I don’t deserve it’, the gut wrenching ‘I hate promoting myself’, the downright self-depracating ‘I’m worthless’. All of these emotions have their place in our journey along this path of self-employment.

All too often it’s not even our jobs that have lead us to have these feelings, our pasts, our childhoods and our relationships have left markings within us which characterise how we deal with situations. I know that many of us, myself included have suffered from a fear of rejection – this can be in relationships or in business. We want to be accepted, we want to be liked. This is one our basic needs as humans as shown in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. After air, water, shelter, food, feeling safe and secure we cannot expect to achieve high self esteem without having met the requirements of feeling loved, having a sense of belonging both within our relationships and our friendships. These are our social needs and sometimes when an element of those are missing we struggle with our self-esteem and self-worth.

Feeling safe and secure is the 2^nd rung in the hierarchy and this element combines our environment – having rules in place to help us feel safe from harm, having an income so that we can pay our rent and mortgages. There’s a reason why Maslow structured his pyramid in the way he did, it simplifies our progression to being truly content – he calls is self actualisation.

Take a minute and think about where in YOUR pyramid you might have elements lacking in fulfilment and how those many be having an impact of your day to day life and consequently on your business too. Right now I’m assuming that you are on the right track to achieving rungs 1 and 2, I’m hear to help you work through your fears and doubts so you can move higher up the steps towards self-actualisation.

As always life will throw curveballs at us to knock us back down from time to time, I’m a great believer that the more curveballs you encounter the closer to the top of this pyramid you will become. Self-doubt is a negative energy, being proactive is its positive cousin. Being ready to accept your fears and work through them is such a cathartic process, one you should feel excited about.

Do you know the reason business coaches, sports coaches, life coaches are called coaches? It really does stem from the mode of transport, coaches. The horse drawn coaches, way back in the ‘olden’ days were used to take people on a journey from one place to another. Can you see the connection now?

Everyone from CEOs, managers, group leaders and sportsmen benefit from having a coach. They don’t employ a coach to beat them up about what they are doing wrong or to point out their inadequacies. Coaches aren’t trained in every industry, that would be an impossibility, but what they do bring is an unwavering, determination to help others succeed.

How do they do this? The time you spend with your coach is entirely about you, your coach should be able to recognise your strengths and how to maximise them to their full potential.The most important aspects of being a coach is engaging trust and having an understanding of confidentiality of everything that is discussed during your time together. Your coach should be able to give you a custom tailored experience which is lead by YOU! Coaching is about finding out what YOUR potential is, how you can achieve new and better things that you though might have been out of your reach.

Your story should be listened to empathetically, this is important for your coach to have an understanding of how you work and reasons for your beliefs and desires. A life of disappointments will lead to an expectation of failure perhaps. Your coach should make you feel like you are really understood.

A good coach will offer effective feedback, will pay attention to your smallest gestures as to what you might actually be feeling about things rather than what you are saying. Verbal behaviours can tell us so much but using eye contact can tell us so much more. Emotional behaviours – avoiding to talk about a certain topic, but can tell a coach an enormous amount as to where that fits in with your overall story and how that can effect your business.

Coaching is a process which can change your mindset to one full of positivity and the drive to achieve your goals. Your coach will help you gain clarity on what you need to do using your skillset.

The one thing your coach can’t do it actually do your work for you, they can help you recognise what is holding you back from success and help create a list of achievable actions to get there.

What is stopping you today from achieving what you set out to achieve?

No time? No customers? No money? Theses are the usual go-to excuses when I challenge my clients. Let’s be honest we can all think of excuses of why we aren’t achieving the success we so desperately want. If you want it bad enough, if you want to succeed to prove to yourself or to others that you can do it then the excuses will soon fall by the wayside.

Having no time is an easy excuse to diminish – it’s purely about better time management. That can be covered in a different blog. Having no money can be a tricky one but there are lots of things you can be doing that are either free or cheap to access.

No customers? Then lets look at why that might be. You have a website and it’s attracting some traffic, you are active on Facebook, you just don’t understand why you aren’t getting the sales you need for your business to grow.

Take a step back and look at the process through the customers eye’s. How are you driving traffic to your website? Are you advertising it in the best way you can to your target audience. Don’t let the word advertising (or marketing for that matter) scare you, you are probably doing it without realising – it might just need to be refined. Your ideal customer isn’t going to find you – you need to find them.

Once they have found you, how simple have you made the sales process for them? Do you have alternative payment options available for example? Try to think of all the possible reasons that customers might not be completing a sale with you.

Is your customer service consistent? Do you have a process in place – inconsistent customer service is a big block to being successful. One wrong review can hugely damage your business. You want your ideal customer to have a smooth transaction with you, receive some great customer service and then they are much more likely to refer you to friends and family.

Blocks to success are usually down to a lack of knowledge or belief or missing skills. Skills can be learnt or you can outsource that part of your business, beliefs can be re-written and knowledge can be also be learnt.

I ask you again, what is the block that is stopping you on your road to success today?