News travels fast and nowadays with the rise of social media, it travels even faster! What started as a platform to meet new people and stay connected with friends has now transformed into one of the largest marketing tools on the planet! Social Media isn’t just for sharing photos of your kids and pets or to complain about politics and current events. Social Media offers another way to connect with your customers, to build your brand and to recruit new talent, yet so many companies are still hesitant on using it or truly understanding its full potential. If you haven’t set up your company page yet, now is the time to do so and here are a few tips to help you succeed.
1. Strategy
You wouldn’t go into a sales meeting without a strategy would you? The same goes for your social channels.
- Determine who will be managing and monitoring your pages.
- Who is your target audience you want to reach?
- What platforms do you want to use? – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest etc.
- Establish goals for each social channel. Is it to grow your audience? Recruit new talent? Push out the latest news? Showcase your industry expertise? Push out promotions?
Jen Tonio, Marketing Manager for 365 Retail Markets says that she like to use Facebook to showcase 365’s culture and give a good behind-the-scenes look into what it’s like at 365. However, she doesn’t limit their posts to just culture.
“We also push out relevant company and industry news to keep our followers engaged and showcase our industry expertise.”
2. Consistency is Key
How often should you post?
As part of your strategy, you should determine the amount of times you plan to post to each channel. Believe it or not it really does matter.
Posting too often can lead to a loss of followers because it begins to feel like spam and not posting enough leads to a drop in engagement and followers begin to feel that your page doesn’t provide enough value for them to continue following you. Treat your social channels the same as any relationship you have, you don’t want to smother them but you don’t want to ignore them either. Find that happy medium.
“I like to keep Facebook posts to a minimum since most people tend to use Facebook as more of a personal channel,” Jen says. “I find it’s best to keep it at 3-4 times a week and only on rare occasions do we post multiple times in one day. Twitter is the opposite. I don’t like to set a limit to our Twitter posts especially during events. A Twitter post carries it’s strongest value in the first 15 minutes it is posted after that it get buried.” She recommends setting a goal of at least 3-4 posts a week.
3. Content is King
Don’t post just to post something. Content Marketing is all the rage and readers appreciate valuable content that they can benefit from. Refer back to your strategy and what the purpose is for each channel. A best practice is to create a content calendar and plan out the topics you want to post about for every month.
So, what should you post about?
Tips and answers to questions your customers may have, Event info, company news, company culture stories and etc. Utilize your blog by writing articles and stories to provide more content you can link to from your social posts.
“We plan out about 6 months worth of topics at a time and then create articles and blog posts around those topics,” Jen says. “We then push out the content through all of our social channels. We do not limit ourselves to these topics we also push out a variety of other content regarding our event presence, company culture and more.”
4. Photos & Videos
Posts with photos and videos receive more engagement than a post with just text. Want to grab someone’s attention? Post a photo. Have a lot to say but your not sure how to write an article or blog post about it? Record a video. It’s really simple and one of the golden rules I live by when posting to social media.
“Every social post we do on Facebook we include a photo,” says Jen, “If we are posting a link we make sure that a photo is included. If it isn’t then we upload our own. For Twitter photos and videos are not mandatory for every post but we make sure to include them as often as possible.”
Follow us on our pages to see best practices in action.
