STOP! Get a grip on your Social Media!
10 Easy Solutions Here…
It doesn’t make a difference if you’re a non-profit organization, a corporation or a political candidate. There is nothing worse than repeatedly reading social media posts that miss the mark of representing your organization appropriately. Simply put, a young, inexperienced social media coordinator hurts the credibility of your business in their lack of understanding as to the repercussions of each time they post inaccurately and/or how they are posting on your behalf. There are dozens of accuracy examples we could use, but you have probably seen them all within your own organization.
Your company will die a slow and painful decline of customers if you subscribe to the old school philosophy (meaning a few years ago) of hiring someone right out of college to manage your corporate brand and image via Social Media.
Common sense, knowledge, professionalism and proper punctuation and grammar is only gained through years of personal experiences and personal mistakes made on the job. Simply place the responsibility of your social media campaign into inexperienced hands and you’ll reap negative consequences. Or, hire a dynamic professional who can represent your organization at the highest standards possible.
Here are Chris Kuban’s key rules to running an effective social media strategy:
1) Social Media Campaigns must be a 24/7 effort. Although there are peak times when users are viewing social media, you have to change up your approach to include evenings and weekends to interact with your audience. There are no set patterns and to reach your goals, you must post at different times. Recently, we analyzed one of our clients social media sites and reaized that the peak of their users are using social media between 6pm and 8:30pm. However, the organization’s internal social media coordinator was only posting between 9am and 2pm. This means that the majority of posts are going unread. Shake things up!
2) Focus on Journalistic Standards.
Each post should be grammatically correct and include references to a minimum of at least three of the five common core standards of journalistic integrity: Explaining the who, what, when, where and why. While being concise, over explain each post to give your followers as much information as possible.
3) Every post should create an ‘action’ for the user.
Yes, almost every post should tell the user to click on the link, view the awesome album of photos or watch and comment on the video. Simply put, if you ask the viewer to take action, they probably will.
4) Use Photos and Video as often as possible.
User statistics will inevitably tell you that users will click to view photo albums and videos at an exponentially higher rate than just posting text. The results will amaze you.
5) Aggressively build your audience and relationships with that audience.
Once you’ve built your audience, you have them captive to receiving multiple messages on a consistent basis. However, you must invest in creating a large captive and ‘relevant’ audience else your social media efforts will be in vain. After analyzing a colleague’s furniture Store social media effort, I realized that 98{fb2cd6ecc5ea822e7d55867f94952838aab4b89ae39846a722113040866900c7} of his social followers will never buy from him. Their daily posts are not only good, their great! However, their use of Social Media is ineffective and wasting time and money because only 2{fb2cd6ecc5ea822e7d55867f94952838aab4b89ae39846a722113040866900c7} of his followers might actually purchase from his store.
6) Post relevant, high quality and up-to-date information.
Nobody wants to know what you had for dinner! Make each post relevant to your organization or relevant to something timely in the news but relate your posts back to your organization.
7) Track and learn from your online statistics.
This should be self-explanatory! But, the reality is that most organizations don’t use their statistics to help them target their audience better. Learn when to post. Learn what posts engage the highest audiences. And, learn quickly on what not to post.
8) Pay for advertising to boost important posts.
It should be obvious that 100{fb2cd6ecc5ea822e7d55867f94952838aab4b89ae39846a722113040866900c7} of your audience is not on Social Media 100{fb2cd6ecc5ea822e7d55867f94952838aab4b89ae39846a722113040866900c7} of the time. Therefore, at any given time, when you post, you will probably only hit 10{fb2cd6ecc5ea822e7d55867f94952838aab4b89ae39846a722113040866900c7} of your intended audience. And, less than that will actually be engaged. Therefore, paying to create your impressions is important to informing and engaging your audience.
9) Use Social Media tools.
Inexpensive or low cost tools are available at the click of your mouse. Just Google “List of Best Social Media Tools!” Whether it’s Hootsuite, Buffer, Sprout Social, SocialFlow, Woobox or Crowdbooster, there are hundreds, if not thousands of software options to assist in better engaging your audience without spending 7 days a week in front of your computer focusing on impromptu posts.
10) Plan, strategize and evaluate.
Depending upon the size of your organization, the detail within your plan may vary dramatically. But, if you don’t write it down, the reality is it’s probably not going to happen.So, begin by setting up concise and measurable goals, as well as milestone dates for your projected accomplishments. You should set attainable goals such as you plan to have X amount of fans by X date. You plan to have x amount of conversions or an incremental percent of sales conversion each month. There are many types of goals to set. But, your plan can be as simple as using a calendar to sketch out themes or promotions to drive your strategy. Or, your strategy can develop into a multi-page document thoroughly outlining specifically which promotions, polls or contests will be done on a specific day of the week or month. Evaluating your analytics and changing your plan should allow you to more accurately focus on your intended outcomes of your social media strategy.
By hiring a dynamic professional to follow the above 10 Social Media best practices as defined by Chris Kuban of Chemistry Multimedia, you’ll have a much better chance of having your Social Media strategy evolve into an amazing success. Call us for a quote at 314-603-2866.
Cyd says:
August 28, 2014 at 4:40 pm
Great article. Appreciate the insight for improving our skills.