When you manage different social media pages you can have a lot of fun. But sometimes we lose track of our focus and we have to remind ourselves of the main purpose of our content.
It’s useful at any stage of your content creation to take a step back and ask yourself: is this contributing towards our main goal? Be that gathering follower to convert later or driving followers to your website.
The next time you schedule a social media post, have a quick check to see if it complies with the five tips every social media manager should follow, that you can read below.
5 Quick Tips Every Social Media Manager Should Follow
1. Be Authentic
A brand must be consistent with who they are, especially on social. One of the worst things a company can do is blatantly copy someone else’s social media efforts.
There are lots of ideas that marketers can share and adapt to their own unique style but when you lose your authenticity and people don’t know who you are then they can’t connect with your brand.
Being authentic is the one thing that no other brand can steal from you and you cannot steal from anyone else so trying is just a waste of time and will only hurt your company in the long term.
As well as being authentic you need to be consistent. Of course, you can change and adapt depending on the social media platform. However, have your core personality match your brand. Just in the same way as a person changes their clothes and style but they don’t change who they are at the core.
2. Avoid online drama
If you stay true to who you are then you are going to attract both lovers and haters. You can’t be a person or a brand that pleases everyone – it’s impossible. Along with the benefits of social media inevitably there are negatives. People can slam your brand and publicly criticise you for all to see.
The best way to deal with negativity is to take it offline as soon as possible. Of course, it can hurt if someone is trashing your company online but you have to think about your response carefully. And yes, you should always respond. It’s not just about the reply to that one person, it’s probably more important for other viewers and how they see you’ve handled that complaint.
Try to be impartial and unemotional in your response and let them know how they can contact you offline to help resolve the issue. The reply you send out can stay on the internet forever so make sure it won’t come back to haunt you like it did at Balognie Castle!
3. Don’t oversell yourself
Social media is a great way for brands to reach a new or/and retain a loyal audience. When it comes to self-promotion, however, it’s not just about getting the message right but also the balance.
If they have chosen to follow you it’s because they are interested in your content or/and offers, not because they want their news feed to be constantly filled with spam. Over promoting will just lead to being unfollowed.
Mix up the content you publish so that your audience won’t get bored of repetitiveness. Write quality content and add blogs to instant articles, create quirky GIFs, share interesting videos, ask for their opinion or add a poll on Twitter. Of course, within your fabulous posts, there is room for promoting but it’s best to be less obvious and creative with your promotions.
Getting someone to follow you is the first step from there you can sway them to become a lead and then convert.
via GIPHY
4. Remember to engage
Social isn’t just a one-way tool used for broadcasting. Too often do brands just send out messages and forget the reason people are on these platforms – to be social.
By doing an advanced search on Twitter you can include what keywords you want and don’t want in and decide on the specific location of the search. I did a quick search for ‘anyone knows designers’ with the location London here on Twitter.
If you are a graphic or web designer freelancer or company then this would be a great opportunity for you to engage in conversation. Of course, not all searches will be relevant but it’s a great way to start a conversation for those that are potentially ready to buy.
5. Make the Most of the Video
Following on from our point of engagement we talk about the video. One of the best ways to boost engagement in through video. It captures our attention far better than images or links so companies really need to be focusing on this as a prime marketing tool.
Four times as many customers would rather watch a video about a product than reading about it (Animoto, 2015). We can easily relate to this, maybe because we value our time or maybe because we are too lazy to read.
We do agree, however, that there is too much information and content overload online. Customers need to prioritize where they devote their attention to and video makes it easy to consume that information.
Every part of the video should be thought out carefully. The visual content and animations should be just as important as the sound and voice over of your video. It’s been noted that English regional accents are becoming increasingly popular for explainer videos.
Take this video with a North London accent for example.
And not every company will have a budget to create videos but you could always try making a slideshow video with a variety of images and text or a short video with subtitles for those who are using Facebook autoplay without sound throughout the day.
What other tips do you follow when planning your social media content within marketing? We’d love for you to share your ideas with us so please get in touch over Twitter or Facebook, also.
See also: Top 5 Tips to Become a Productive Social Media Marketer
