Are you juggling several social media channels? Not sure what to post and when or where to find content?
Here are some tips to help your content bloom and grow your social media presence.
1. Know your audience
It is very important to know your target audience and post content that is useful and appealing to them. Know who you are marketing to and adjust your company’s voice to speak to them. Make sure you are using the right channels for your business, this blog may help if you are unsure. You don’t need to be on every channel – concentrate your efforts on the channels that your target audience use.
2. Know when and how often to post
Aim to post once a day on Facebook. According to HubSpot, you get 32% more engagement when posting on Saturday and Sunday, and 18% more engagement when posting on Thursday and Friday – though it will depend on when your audience is online.
On Twitter, you need to tweet enough to get noticed so aim for between 3 and 5 times a day. Hubspot also recommends that if you’re a business-to-business company, tweets perform 16% better during business hours, and business-to-consumer tweets perform 17% better on weekends.
According to the LinkedIn small business guide, if you post once a day during the week, you’ll reach at least 60% of your audience.
For Instagram, aim for one or two posts a day and it is better to post more during off-work hours.
3. Engage in conversation
This may sound obvious but it is important to interact, retweet, reply and engage with your audience to spark ideas and encourage conversations. Educating people about your industry rather than selling will help you to establish credibility and act as a go-to resource. We recommend that no more than two in every five updates are about sales and promotion and aim for 50% of your content to be your own original content – the other 50% should be shared from others to promote your brand to them.
4. Keep your content fresh
Our team allocates time each day scanning the internet for content to curate for clients. This process helps to keep content fresh, relevant and up to date with industry trends.
Simple posts like quotes, quick tips or a picture can also help to add interest and variety to schedules. Even if you don’t have anything new to talk about you know that something is being posted but do make sure your content has value to your audience.
Writing a regular blog is a fantastic resource for new and original content that will also help drive traffic to your website.
One thing to try to avoid is posting exactly the same content on every channel. Instead, use a voice (and content) that is appropriate for each channel. for example, it is unlikely that the same post would work well on both Facebook and LinkedIn.
5. Save everything!
If there is a particular article or image that you come across that would be useful for any of your social media channels save it and add it to a content schedule. Create a list of trusted influencers or places you are likely to get information to share which would be of interest to your audience. This can be your ‘go to’ place when sharing content.
6. Use Hashtags
Hashtags should make it easier for people to find relevant content and should form part of your social media strategy. Using the right hashtags on Twitter and Instagram can expose you to new followers who are interested in these topics. Here is a really useful article from Social Media Week on how to use hashtags in social media marketing effectively. There are a number of free tools to help you utilize hashtags such as Hashtagify.me and TweetDeck. One that our team has been trying out lately is Ritetag. We will let you know how we get on!
7. Use images
Use video and images to break up your content and add appeal. People’s brains process images faster than text and, as the saying goes,“a picture paints a 1000 words.” Images can add meaning and evoke an emotional response to messages and are an excellent method of reinforcing your brand.
8. Planning tools
Content planning is essential to the success of every social media marketing campaign and, if you are managing several networks, planning tools can make the task easier and help you to be more productive. There are many apps available, the Concise team prefer ContentCal and Hootsuite. You can schedule posts in advance, view multiple channels at once, manage lists and have a visual summary of content. We reviewed ContentCal in this blog post in September last year and in this recent post.
What changes are you going to make to your content creation/curation as we move into Spring? Let us know in the comments below.