Social Media Marketing Dos & Don'ts

It’s a digital jungle out there - how are you going to stay at the forefront of your prospects’ minds?

Face to face networking is all very well...but then Covid 19 happened, and not only are we all limited to screen time for interaction, but it is more important than ever to be present online as that is where everyone is at the moment.  Social media will open you up to the world and keep you visible in your followers’ eyes, and as long as you have an internet connection, it can be managed anywhere (or outsourced). 80% of customers will look for a form of social proof before opting to buy from a company, so it is really worth putting your time and effort into your social media appearance.

So how do you go about this?

Where are your customers hanging out? Here are some questions to consider:

1. Are you B2B or B2C? If the former, definitely make sure you have a LinkedIn Company Page - you won’t need to constantly update this, but your personal LinkedIn profile should share stuff from it.

2. Is your product ‘imagey’ or ‘wordey’? This will help you decide on Instagram or Twitter. 

3. You’ve identified some platforms where you will find your ideal customers, but don’t invest your time in too many - it is better to use 2 really well than spread yourself too thinly among several. Register your handles! If possible, you should keep the same name on all of your social media platforms, and ideally will be your company name so you are recognisable.

Content! What will your followers be expecting to see on their feed from your social media page?

More people will react with your posts than specifically go to your page so don’t worry about repetition (too much - Facebook will deprioritise posts it deems are the same, yet at the same time, they only release new posts to a very low percentage of your followers initially, and then increase those who can see it depending on reactions, so even if you do repeat, you can guarantee it won’t be seen twice!) Don’t forget things like company news, reviews and corporate social responsibility.

When to post?

Facebook, and Instagram all show how your posts are performing via analytics - and using these, you can work out when the majority of your followers are online, and then schedule your content to appear at those times. For Twitter and LinkedIn, it is best to open an account with a scheduler like www.buffer.com, whose software can analyse your followers and calculate when the optimal times to post are.

Corporate Social Responsibility.

Did you know that 70% of consumers will consider the ‘niceness’ of a brand before buying? It’s really worth thinking about doing things that will have a positive impact on the world and society to tell your followers about, and also to help you stand out in a crowded marketplace. If you are not sure about something you can physically ‘do’, why not set up a donation to charity via www.workforgood.com ?

Make your content accessible.

Make sure people who can’t hear (and those in noisy environments) plus those who use screenreaders can also understand your brand messages with these tips:

1. Capitalise the beginning of each word in a hashtag to make them screenreader friendly - screenreaders will recognise that a capital letter indicates a new word and will read accordingly. #ScreenReaderFriendly

2. Ensure accuracy on subtitles by manually adding them yourself on Youtube or  by using a website like https://www.rev.com/ or to add subtitles before uploading to your platform/website. If  your budget is low Google Chrome Documents have an audio writer - open a new doc,  hold your video to a microphone and the software will recognise your words as text. You can also edit subtitles in Youtube or Kapwing. Concise Training have explained how easy this is to do on Facebook.

3. Screenreaders only recognise abbreviations when there are full stops between each letter. We mention Corporate Social Responsibility a lot, and to save letters, we use ‘C.S.R.’ on Twitter and image descriptions.

4. Make sure every image you upload has its description added to it so screenreaders have something to read that isn’t programming gobbledegook. I have added how to do this in the checklist for each platform below (Instagram is yet to add this feature)

Finding followers.

Your first action, after setting up a first post and devising your strategy, should be to invite all your friends to like/follow - these people love you and will want to support you. But they probably aren’t that interested in your product/service, and the best way to up the follower count on Facebook & Instagram is through paid advertising. You  will need to set up an ad account on Facebook to do this, and you should think about a minimum spend of £300.00 a month - you can target profiles that meet your ideal customer demographic and choose whether you want them to like your page or go to your website. You can also do this on Twitter and LinkedIn separately - please note that a vastly higher ad spend is required for LinkedIn.

 

Checklist for organic posts on each platform

 

Facebook

With 2.5 billion active monthly users, you can guarantee that most of your customers exist on Facebook. The most common age group who use this platform are 25-34 and 50% of 18-24 year olds look at it upon waking up. Remember to feature things like news, views and opinions in your posts - people on Facebook don’t want to be sold to all the time.

• Text - you can use a paragraph’s worth of words on Facebook, and use hashtags to highlight words that you would embolden. (Don’t go overboard - this isn’t Instagram!)

• Image - a good picture showing what your post about will make your post stand out on your follower’s feeds and might even inspire them to share

• Image Description - hover over your image preview and select ‘edit’. On the next screen, hit ‘alt text’ and input your image description. Press save on the bottom right and then post!

• Link - if you have a link, make sure there’s an image on the website it goes through that will pull through to your Facebook post so you can remove the hyperlink address!

 

Twitter

Twitter has 330 million active monthly users and 38% of these are between the ages of 18 and 29. 26% of users are 30-49 years old. Short posts leading to web pages work well here - the feed moves so fast, people will be looking for things to click on, and often aren’t interested in long articles.

• Text - keep it short and sweet - Twitter is fast moving and you’ll want to get your followers’ attention quickly! Using hashtags for findability was pioneered by Twitter but don’t go overboard, 3 or 4 is quite enough, and as with Facebook posts, you can use these to highlight text

• Image - Twitter is mostly viewed on mobile so images need to be especially distinct and not detailed so they can be seen as a small picture. 

• Image Description - make sure you have selected ‘Compose image description’ in your settings. Twitter explains how to do this.Then as with Facebook, click on your image thumbnail then enter a description.

• Link - Most scheduler software will shorten these automatically so you get more text space

 

LinkedIn

There are 310 million monthly active users on here and 90 million of these are senior-level influencers and 63 million are in decision-making positions. Like Facebook, it’s best to avoid the selling posts here - give your business connections a reason to look more into what you offer!

• Text - Like Facebook, you can use a paragraph’s worth of words on LinkedIn and hashtags to embolden.

• Image - a good picture will enable you to stand out in a follower’s feed and also will inspire shares.

• Image Description - click on 'Add Description' once you have uploaded an image

• Link - LinkedIn will automatically shorten links for you and pull through images if they are there.

 

Instagram

1 billion people user Instagram every month and 71% of these are under the age of 35. 81% use the platform to research products & services, so if you’ve got some great photos that explain what you’re about, make sure they’re up there!

• Text - Sometimes long texts work, sometimes short does, but what is really important for Instagram is hashtags! I have found that if you don’t use these, you won’t generate any views. You can use up to 30 hashtags per post (hide them in a comment to avoid a messy looking post) and ideally you want a mixture of general words and niche ones with less than 150,000 post mentions. Try to mix them up a bit for each post as well

• Image - the most important part of your Instagram strategy! You should be trying not to repeat too many of these if you can (although colour variations of logos can make grids look nice), and if you can use video, that does perform really well on the platform.

• Link - Links will not hyperlink in individual Instagram posts, so you need to make sure that the link in your bio is the one you want people to go to and then tell them in the post to visit the #LinkInBio

It’s important not to panic if you feel your posts are doing as well as you think they should be doing. Facebook, in particular, wants to prioritise individuals over business pages, and this means that repetition is not something you should be afraid of doing. Use your analytics to work out when the majority of your followers are online, and make sure your post during those times. Use your first few months to see how you go with organic posts, before even thinking about budgeting for an ad spend.

As your business grows, the more content you will develop, and so your posts will become more varied over time. 

Jo, the is the founder of  Seeing Social, a social media management consultancy for brands that do good! As well as platform management, she offers 1 hour advisory slots for companies who just need answers on what to do with their social media! Contact her at jo.barber@seeing-social.co.uk for more details.