Social media serves so many purposes, from marketing your products or your brand, growing a community, social awareness, and even helping other businesses tackle their digital marketing.
No one knows this better than Ray Pastoors, the founder of LYF Solutions, an ethical digital marketing agency helping small to large-sized businesses to scale their brand and business.
We sat down with Ray to chat about all things digital marketing and how Ray and LYF Solutions use social media for both their own and their client’s social media strategies. Plus, Ray shares his top tips for building out an effective social media content strategy.
How Ray has used social media to build his business
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“LYF Solutions has existed in different shapes and forms for over two decades now, so we’ve been around for longer than social media has been a thing! I jumped onto social media very quickly for my digital marketing clients, but it wasn’t till my team grew that I made a conscious decision to utilize social media for my own business as well.
I consider myself very fortunate to have an incredibly creative, diverse, and dedicated team who genuinely enjoys what they do. Although we are an entirely remote team (and have operated that way long before the events of 2020 and beyond), we are very close-knit and committed to LYF Solutions’ ethics and business goals.
I mention this because since social media is ever-changing and so wide-reaching, having a team like this has allowed us to have a lot of insight into the different ways people use social media. That’s why I decided last year that we’d get together several times over the year to just brainstorm content ideas specifically for LYF Solutions. It’s both strange and exciting, giving our own business the ‘client treatment’!
While we have always – and will always – use social media to educate our followers and promote the businesses, organizations, movements, and causes that are important to us, we have recently begun to share more about the people behind LYF Solutions too.
I’m quite camera-shy, so this has been a brand-new experience for me! But true to form, Instagram audiences have responded really well to seeing the human side of our business. My team jokes that I’m all about the numbers and data, and they’re right! So I believe we’ll continue sharing more light-hearted and relatable (but still educational and helpful) content for our followers to engage with.”
Ray on his favorite things about social media
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“I love how such diverse communities from all over the world can connect and communicate on social media for a common goal!
LYF Solutions has an ethical charter that is based on our core values. This means, as a business, we are committed to sustainability, diversity, inclusivity, and empowering marginalized communities. We also make it a point to not take on clients in unethical industries, like companies that conduct animal testing, or have unsafe or exploitative work conditions (among other criteria).”
Being an ethical company that exclusively supports other ethical companies is the very basis of what we do, and social media has allowed us to discover businesses, causes, and movements that would otherwise might not have as much reach in traditional media due to budget constraints.
We also relish the opportunities that come from the ever-changing social media space. A great example is when video content became hot on Instagram. We definitely had to take a step back to think about how we were going to tackle it, but we’ve now made video a huge part of our own social media strategy as well as for our clients. And like any algorithm, this constantly changes – so it keeps us on our toes to test and learn content for our clients and us.”
Life before and after scheduling and auto-posting
“I was very lucky that I have a dear friend and colleague who had started using Plann very early on, so we’ve been on this platform for a long time. Before that, we would have to manually post to a page and set a phone alarm to make sure we got the content out on time.”
Using social media to grow a community
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“The awareness around sustainability, clean energy, and ethical living has really boomed thanks to social media. It’s so much easier for the message to get out there when there’s such a variety of content on social media that tackle the very real issues facing our planet and the impact it will have on all of us in the future!
“Thanks to social media, I have also become a part of a warm, vibrant, and supportive community of small local business owners that really walk the talk. Discovering these businesses and getting to know the people behind them – and oftentimes also taking them on as clients – has been such an unexpected and delightful experience.
I think social media oftentimes is regarded rather negatively, but I believe that it’s a case of ‘you get back what you put in’. So we focus on sharing meaningful, valuable, and uplifting content, and so we’ve always received that same energy back!”
Ray on the first thing he noticed when using Plann
“The first thing we noticed was the seamless interplay between the mobile and desktop app. This has been incredibly useful for our remote working team!
The user interface (UI) on the desktop is also so easy to interact with, and although Plann has grown to include a whole heap of new features, it somehow still feels really simple to navigate.”
How Plann has helped Ray’ and his clients
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“We use Plann every day to schedule clients’ posts, plan client feeds, and find inspiration for posts. It’s made the social media aspect of our digital marketing services so much simpler!
As a team, Plann allows us to have one spot for our content strategists, graphic designers, video editors, copywriters, and clients to come together to work on social media strategies. Plann has also seamlessly integrated with the rest of the cloud-based programs we use to ensure our processes are as efficient as possible.”
Ray on his favorite Plann features
“We love the ease of scheduling and also how you can repurpose content with just a couple of clicks. The free content tool is also a fantastic way to find high-quality filler content when we need it. The new easy link feature is a new fan favorite, it looks on-brand for us and makes bio link adding a breeze.”
Ray’s top tips for building out beautiful aesthetics on Instagram
“While a beautiful aesthetic isn’t really the focus of our own Instagram feed (to my social media team’s delight), we do prioritize it for our clients. I think having a branding kit is a big part of creating a cohesive, aesthetically pleasing social media presence.
Your brand is more than a logo and some colors. Consider other aspects like how you want people to feel, and how you speak and respond – whilst it may sound like fluff, these are what make great brands succeed and stand out.”
Ray shares his best advice for making the most out of social media in 2023
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“Create a content strategy! When it comes to social media, too many businesses just wing it. A content strategy will ensure your messaging and content pillars come through in every post, and will avoid the stress of having to come up with posts on the fly.
Plus, the process of creating a content strategy presents an opportunity for you to think critically about the purpose of your social media – is it to connect? To sell? To add to your digital brand presence? Perhaps a combination of these? You won’t know for sure until you sit down and intentionally strategies ahead of time.”
What’s next for Ray’s business
“We are about to launch our new social media service packages for 2023 and are looking at ways we can continue to drive ethics in content marketing. Our team is also excited to introduce Australians to our new brand True Green™ which supercharges our commitment to make a difference in the environment with our Green Web Hosting service.”
Ready to supercharge your success on social media in 2023?
Looking for an all-in-one content creation suite that allows you to manage your social media channels effortlessly? From mapping out your strategy and designing your graphics to saving plug-and-play hashtag sets, you’ll find everything you need inside Plann.
Go on, and redeem your 7-day free trial of Plann Plus. If you don’t like it, keep using Plann for free!
