June Challenge - Complete

 

June, I set myself the challenge of Raspberry Iguana posting on social media every day, currently Raspberry Iguana is on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest and I did it! I posted 30 times on all three accounts with the exception of Pinterest which missed out on the ‘hope you are enjoying the sunshine’ post. 

Impulsive as ever, I jumped two feet in and set the challenge on the evening of the 31^st May which didn’t give me much time to prepare but equally not too much time to overthink it either. At this point I hadn’t told anyone about Raspberry Iguana on social media except my husband and this was how I left it for the first week. Even now, I still have only shared the pages with my immediate family because I wanted to complete the June challenge first, this may seem strange but my logic behind it is, when I do shout about their existence there will already be content there, the pages will look, fun, engaging and bright (hopefully) and give the audience a sense of what to expect from the accounts. The main aim was the grid on Instagram – I wanted it full of colour, slightly established and exciting to look at, naturally if I am posting on one then I might as well post on all. Despite the tight self-given deadline, I did put together a rough a plan, I made a list of the days in June and started with easy events that I knew were happening June, Father’s Day, my birthday and my smallest smalls birthday – each of these have a space on the grid. I decided that I would welcome each month with a hello message which didn’t just solve the first of June but literally all coming months forevermore (this feels like an easy win). I took to google to look at national or global days that were taking place in June that were either relevant to Raspberry Iguana or just a bit of fun – note that it is always important to do a double google on these as I am yet to find a reliable source for these, so I find cross checking multiple sources is the safest way to be accurate. Finally, I thought about my days of the week and my plans in my homelife that may impact posting and tried to fill in the blanks with what I felt was achievable on certain days because let’s be honest life can be hectic and unnecessary added pressure is not welcome. I used lots of references from other shared social media plans on the likes of Pinterest to inspire ideas; there are lots of different hashtags for the days of the week, Motivational Monday was a favourite of mine – this will be regularly used because I like the positive start to each week. 

I genuinely loved this challenge, I’m not sure I could keep it up every month, but it will definitely be something I do again. 

It gave me creative freedom to not be too serious and would not be solely product based. The challenge helped to define different camps of Raspberry Iguana and the purpose behind each platform – Folksy is the shop, Instagram and Facebook are fun and creative, sharing some product but mostly just what is going on in the Raspberry Iguana world or wider world; Pinterest is where you will see social media posts mirrored (for the most part) but with the added behind the scenes boards of inspiration and the blog is for me to ramble on about Raspberry Iguana and life. 

In the future I want to try and get a head of myself and use scheduling for Facebook and Instagram; I didn’t get ahead of myself in June and was literally preparing and posting on the same day. I think this tool will make future months a lot easier;  particularly with the summer holidays fast approaching. 

Anyway, June has now ended and we are into July so what is the plan for this new month I hear you ask?

July will not have a post a day, the summer holidays starting, and the military operation involved needing to prepare for our actual family holiday may have something to do with it. However, there will be a different set of monthly challenges to achieve because steps in the right direction, however small are still steps. So, July challenges are

Start filming content, editing it too; maybe set-up a Tik Tok account (stay tuned)

Shout about Raspberry Iguana, my immediate family are the only ones who know about my small business, I need to bite the bullet and start talking about it and sharing it with anyone and everyone who will listen.

Please pop back and read all about how it is going and more importantly if I achieved my July goals. I will get my thinking cap on for August too – deep into the unknown of the Summer Holidays (if you don’t hear from me, please send for help or send gin both would be welcomed).