Social media delivers huge benefits to businesses, particularly start-ups and SMEs, after all 71% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and family. However, it isn’t always easy to know how to approach social media, or if what you are doing is delivering the maximum benefits.
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We will be giving you our top social media tips for businesses in a two-part blog. Here are our first 3 tips…
For your business to be successful on social media, you need to understand what your competitors are doing, how to get the most out of different platforms, and what platforms your current and target audiences are engaging with. Spend time analysing your competitors’ social channels and learn from what they are doing well and what they could improve on.
Also, take time to research the demographics (age, gender, etc) of each of the channels your business is on. This will help you to be more specific when targeting your content.
Research what content works well on each platform. Certain forms of content, for example, video, delivers 130% more engagement than still images. This could be because of a platform’s algorithms favouring video, or because users enjoy engaging with video content more than still images. Either way, it is important to understand what forms of content work well on different channels.
This is particularly important if you are not the only one managing your brand’s social media accounts. As a business, consistency on social is important. Content plans and brand guidelines are a good way of ensuring consistency. Content plans are used to outline what to post on different channels and are usually created a month in advance. Brand guidelines should include things like tone of voice, brand message, and a style guide for social media graphics. Best practices for brand guidelines are making sure to include design standards, such as font, type size, and colours, and including key words to describe your brand’s tone of voice, for example, ‘professional, friendly, and approachable’.
Once your content plan is created, scheduling tools will make posting a lot easier. Your content plan makes it easy for anyone to schedule content and will save valuable time you can be spending on your business. Some examples of good scheduling tools are Hootsuite, Buffer, and in-platform scheduling from Facebook. But, beware: make sure you amend any scheduled content that has become irrelevant, for example promotion of an event that has been cancelled. Also, remember to check back in for replies to your content.
If you found this blog post helpful, then come back to our blog later, when we will be posting the second part of our Social Media Tips for Businesses blog.
OggaDoon specialises in guerrilla communications and marketing to gain you reach.
