Has your excitement about the potential of social media to grow your business been replaced with a dull feeling of inadequacy? There are only so many times you can watch as your painstakingly crafted post disappears into a stream of info-traffic without being noticed.
So how do you make social media work for you? Investing a little time to plan your content is key. Find the schedule, topics and format of content that will increase customer engagement with your online brand and maximise your time investment.
Five steps to optimise your social media content:
1. Plan your posts with a content calendar. It may sound fancy, but you don’t need an online tool or ‘techy’ brain. Use a spreadsheet or Gmail calendar to outline for the next three months what you will post, when and to which network.
Use: Hootsuite to schedule content in the future. Post whether you are at your computer or skiing in the Alps.
2. Don’t just talk about yourself. Awkward self-promotion is a painful, modern disease. Don’t fall prey to this epidemic. Be authentic and engaging in your content. Although the ratio of promotion to other types of posts will be unique to your business, you should leave space for a healthy dose of:
– Sharing or curating other content and giving credit to others where it is due
– Questions and discussion points to directly engage your customers
– Content you have created yourself
Use: There are plenty of great content curation tools to stay up to date with all the latest news in your industry:
Paper.li – curate and publish your own daily newspaper
Flipboard – flip through the latest social content on your smartphone
Feedly – Stream all your favourite content producers into one useful feed
3. Review and evolve with evidence. Your customers are unique to your business and the only way to know what they respond to is through reviewing and measuring the analytics you have. Be responsive and if something isn’t working, try something else. Social media is about trial and error there is no right or wrong.
Use: Hootsuite – to gather simple easy-to-use analytics about your tweets.
Google analytics – to track how many visitors to your site were brought there by your social content.
4. Create. There is only so much that sharing, commenting and quick text promotion can do for your digital brand. If you really want to pull people from their social media comfort zone to your website and your products, create some content of your own on your website and then share it on social media. Engaging blog posts, interesting images or a quick video will do the trick.
5. Know your brand. If your brand were a person what would he or she post and when?
Find out more: Do you know your brand’s social identity?
