Your Company has decided to adopt a social media plan and they put you in charge. Don’t panic. When executed properly social media can be exciting and extremely useful for interacting and engaging with your online community. In 8 simple steps we’ll help you figure which platforms are best to use for your goals, how to add value, and give you tips to expand your social reach.
- Adopt: Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn?? Before you take the leap consider why social media is critical for business.
- 79%of companies surveyed use or plan to use social media.
- Social media helps brand awareness. Harvard Business Review
- It’s another avenue for authentic engagement with your audience.
- Social media gives you feedback and customer insights.
- You can use it to drive traffic (potential customers) to your website.
- Audience: Before creating content or posting updates, it’s critical to think about your audience. Are you selling to the partner? Partners, are you trying to attract potential vendors? Audience is KEY. Establish who your ideal customer is in addition to your target market.
- Different social channels have different audiences:
- Twitter use by the 25-34 age group has more than doubled, rising from 9% to 19%. 95% of Twitter users own a mobile phone. PewResearch
- Women are five times more likely to use Pinterest. MediaBistro
- 39% of LinkedIn users are 35-54. Business Insider
- It’s more important to fully engage in a few social channels than be on every possible platform.
- Understand the type of information your audience wants.
- Pulling Content:
- Remember the 70/30% rule. Promote your company but don’t just sell. Be a trusted advisor and a source of information. Make 70% of content relevant industry information and 30% about your company.
- Search for interesting articles you can link to on trusted platforms. Example: Forbes, Business Insider, The VARGuy, Inc. etc.
- Suggestion: Feedly is a great content aggregator.With it you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of industry blogs and news sites to find content around topics that interest your customers.
- Feedly is one of the many tools CMC recommends. Check out other Social Media tools in our blog “7 Social Media Tools You’re Not Using… But Should Be.”
- Wondering if you should post a particular article? Check on a few things first:
- The article date, making sure it’s not time sensitive.
- Is the article trying to sell a product? If so, follow the 70/30 rule.
- Is the information useful for your audience?
- Writing Content: Now that you found your articles, let’s write social posts to accompany them.
- Set up a system that to track revisions and approvals such as a spreadsheet if multiple members on your team are working on it.
- Write different posts for each channel, keeping the audience of each platform in mind.
- Twitter has a maximum of 140 characters, we suggest maxing at 120 so it’s easier to share. (Try writing the post in twitter to make sure it fits).
- Share as much visual content as possible.
- Visual content drives engagement. In fact, just one month after the introduction of Facebook timeline for brands, visual content — photos and videos — saw a 65% increase in engagement. HubSpot
- Get involved with what’s trending or give credit to the companies you’re writing about by using the @mention to acknowledge them.
- Change words that are industry relevant into #’s for more visibility on your content. #contentmarketing #socialmedia
- Use bit.ly to shorten article URLs (so they take up less room in in the post) and gives the ability to track analytics.
- Posting: Decide if you will post in real time or use a scheduling platform.
- Posting in real time is the best option, but who has time!?
- These days social scheduling is common practice.
- Hootsuite and Buffer are two scheduling platforms that allows you to manage multiple social platforms from one interface.
- Engagement: Engaging with your social media community can be even more important than pushing out content.
- Check daily.
- Respond to comments, thank for Retweets, favorite for favorite, etc. Bottom line- you must engage!
- Analytics: After you’ve created, posted and engaged it’s important to track engagement proving to your company why it’s a good idea for them to utilize Social Media. What should you track?
- Comments
- Likes
- Favorites
- New followers/connections
- Retweets
- Mentions
- Pinned
- Clicks
- Repeat!
Congrats! You have successfully become apart of the social media community!
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