161: {Solo} How to win with Social Media Marketing in 2026

Interested in how to leverage social media marketing to help grow and scale your business? This episode is for you! I'm talking through exactly how to start, what you should and should not be doing. And how consistency is truly king. 

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Transcript

Caroline Pennington (00:00.33)
All right, if you are interested in using social media to grow your business and or your personal brand this year, listen up. This podcast episode is for you. I've been at it for over two and a half years now, and I'm to tell you exactly what I would do so you don't make the mistakes that I made. And trust me, I made so many mistakes in the beginning. I still make mistakes now. So if you're interested in ramping up your business on social media,

There's a couple things I would do. First of all, you need to optimize your profile. Make sure it's clear who you are, what you do, how people can reach you, how you can serve them. You wanna make sure to have a good profile picture uploaded as well. In my opinion, I would do a headshot, something from the shoulders up to represent you. We live in a day of AI everything, and so the more human that you can be, the better.

If this is for your business, obviously have your business logo uploaded instead of the picture of you. Then make sure your tagline and you have less than three seconds to capture someone's attention. So you want to make sure it's really clear of who you are, what you do, how you can serve them. Okay. So make sure that is uploaded as well. Then you want to make sure you look at your feed and you want to make sure

If you're on Instagram, you've got the nine photos uploaded. If you're on LinkedIn, you want to make sure that you're starting to post regularly because those show up in the past post section. Um, if you are on Instagram, you want to make sure those nine pictures uploaded, you want to, that's as far down as most people are going to scroll. So at least make sure that portion is taken care of as well. So you want to optimize your profile. You want to start putting content out there. Okay. And.

2026 is the year of the horse. 2025 is the year of the snake. 2026 is the year of the horse. What does that mean? It means people are craving more authenticity. They want to connect human connection. They want to know who they're doing business with, what their values are, what type of person they are, what time of business they run. Do you have high sense of urgency? Are you slower to respond to things? All of that needs to come across in your marketing of how people

Caroline Pennington (02:18.114)
are gonna experience you as a professional, how people are gonna experience your business, okay? Number three, I would start engaging with other content creators. Don't go crazy and start engaging with like the really large 100K plus creators because your comments and your engagement is just gonna go straight to the bottom.

So start picking out people to partner with or collaborate with or engage with to have smaller audiences, micro influencers. And that way your, what you comment or your emojis or your likes will be seen by their audience. And what that creates is cross pollination. Cross pollination is how you're going to supercharge. It's like wildfire when it comes to social media marketing, because all of their followers can now see your comments on their content.

And also I will say in the online space is obviously not required. Everybody's different, but the law of reciprocity exists in a very big way online. So if you're trying to get someone's attention, maybe you to be on their podcast. Maybe you'd love to have them engage with your stuff too. You have to start giving engagement to them first before you will receive it. And they may never engage with you back. And that's okay too. That's the biggest risk that you'll run, which who cares anyways.

But start giving it and when you do comments, do more than the emojis actually write thoughtful things. You don't have to write a book. You don't have to write several sentences, thoughtful comments go a really long way. And that way when you slide it in their DMS, you want their services, their products, you'd like to put yourself up on their podcasts or whatnot. They, these are somewhat familiar with who you are and they will recognize your name, which leads to more likely likelihood of you getting a response. So.

For social media marketing in 2026, do those three things. Opt to find your profile, start putting content out there consistently, and then start engaging with other accounts. I don't mean sit there all day and do comments to other people. mean, three to five a day is an appropriate number. Also, when I talk about doing content, five days a week is the magic number. If you can do seven, do seven, but if seven's too much, start with five. Do Monday through Friday.

Caroline Pennington (04:37.686)
Whatever day it is that you want to start showing up, maybe you can see that your followers are more active around noon, lunchtime, they're doom scrolling. Maybe it's the mornings. Just start paying attention to your analytics. And when your audience and your followers show up, that's when you need to show up too. So I hope that you enjoyed today's episode. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe until next time.