Don’t wreck your social media strategy!

January 24, 2015

People Expect You to Be on Social Media

Maybe you don’t have a website yet, but please, please, at least be on Facebook. If a website is not in your sights just yet, you can use all social media platforms as a place to inform your visitors, and potential customers, of business hours, a description of your business and services you offer and other useful information.

Say you’re a restaurant. You have open hours. You want people to know these hours. You’re afraid people won’t find these hours because your website isn’t up and running yet. Go ahead and get on Facebook (and other platforms). I’m always relieved when businesses are aptly using their social media to tell me what I need and/or want to know.

Keep the following points in mind when managing your social media marketing content.

Know Your Target Market

An article by writtent mentions, according to experts at Forbes, “32” is the golden number of hours a business should spend on a single social media platform each month. If you’re a small company with a small staff, that number is probably unreachable. Honing in on your target market and knowing which platform the majority of your potential clients are on will help you figure out which social media you need to be dedicating time to. MayeCreate’s target market is small business owners so we mostly use Facebook and Twitter. However, we do promote our blog posts on LinkedIn and Google+, and share our recently completed websites on Pinterest. Software like HootSuite can help you post to multiple platforms with one fell swoop, allowing a little more time for response interaction.

Posts and Tweets Last Forever

While you can delete Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest posts, you can NOT delete Twitter Tweets. When you post something, even to those platforms from which you can delete something, how many people will see it before it’s deleted? Don’t chance it.

When posting to social media, avoid losing credibility by keeping these things in mind:

• People who follow you can see everything you post, whether as yourself or to another person/business, so keep everything positive.
• Keep it clean and grammatically correct.
• If you do get negative public feedback (it sadly does happen), don’t respond emotionally. Don’t delete it and make yourself seem embarrassed or reactive. Do respond, staying neutral and factual, and provide confirmation that the problem will be worked out as soon as possible.
• Add personal flair, but keep it professional. If you wouldn’t want a client to see it, don’t post it. (Sidenote: Don’t complain. Even on your own personal feeds. As a business, I’m sure you’re linked to some clients even through your personal social media. I’ll say it again… If you don’t want a client (or your grandma) to see it, just walk away.)

All Work and No Play Makes Social Media a Dull Place

No one wants to read about work all the time. The best performing blogs contain a variety of content: business related posts, content shared from other sources and personal posts. Think of your own content this way and apply the following 70/20/10 rule…

• 70% of your content should be business related; for example, MayeCreate provides marketing advice, advice on how to monitor your website’s analytics and tips for logo design.
• 20% should be interesting articles and findings from other sources around the web related to your industry.
• 10% can be personal content such as recently completed projects, images from around your office or info about upcoming events.

Important Tips:

1. Whatever you’re posting about, always include a picture in your posts, if you can… (Darn you, limited characters! I’m looking at you, Twitter!) People love pictures and they grasp attention better than mere words.
2. Make sure to include the link to whatever you’re sharing, whether it be an article you wrote or that interesting post you found elsewhere on the interwebs.

Sales Bullying is Bad

The point of being on social media is to put yourself out there and help create business…obviously. But there’s nothing more annoying than “Buy this!” “You want this!” “Get this deal!” When selling yourself online, be more subtle. Promote your completed work or projects; share the personality of your business. These are the things that bring in work, not yelling at people to purchase something.

Stay In-the-Know

Remember to stop and smell the roses. Check in with your social media results. Whether you use a social media management system, like HubSpot or HootSuite, or have to dig for your results, check in with your efforts. See which posts receive the most reach, comments, likes or clicks.

Staying on top of your social media results also helps you figure out if the times and days you’re posting to social media is the best time to engage your followers. If you aren’t seeing much interaction with your posts, consider playing around with the times of day you post.

You may want to take the easy route and only keep up with your website analytics, but it’s important to keep track of how you’re interacting with your social media viewers.

Keep on Keepin’ On

Remember….Rome wasn’t built in a day. And for that matter, nor was your business! Social media strategy is an ever-growing “beastie” (That’s a Monica term.) Just because you posted a bunch of times one week doesn’t mean you can slack off and not post the next week. Make yourself a goal. Maybe start by spending 30 minutes a day looking for interesting articles to share, find something interesting in your office to post about or promote a recent project. Slowly, but surely, you’ll get into the groove and show your social media who’s boss.