These are social media best practices that everyone should be following, regardless of industry or goals.
There is no one way to social media market that works for everyone. There are some common pitfalls that can lead to disaster for anyone. These include PR disasters and seemingly innocent mistakes like posting identical content to every platform.
Audit your performance
Your following is expanding. Your engagement rates have soared. Daily comments and DMs are received from happy customers. Your content is fire. Do you think life is great? No!
You may be happy right now, but what is the reason? These great results are due to what? It’s great to be lucky, but it’s better to learn why your content performs well or poorly so that you can create repeatable processes for success.
Pro tip Let Hootsuite determine when your personal best time to post for each platform and goal. This feature is part of Hootsuite Analytics. It comes with advanced metrics tracking, reporting, and other features so that you can spend less time looking at spreadsheets and more on optimizing your campaigns.
Cross-post to other platforms — but make adjustments
It is not a content strategy to auto-share your Facebook posts to Twitter. You can, and should reuse content across multiple channels, but that’s not the keyword: Repurposing.
Instead of just posting a link to your blog post on all your social media accounts and not addressing the key points, make this article a Twitter thread.
It doesn’t take a lot of production to make threads, videos, TikToks, carousel posts, and other content. For every article. It’s okay to share a link. Make sure to reuse as much content as you can. This will enable you to create more quickly.
Tip: Using generic marketing strategies, you can’t expect to build a dedicated following. To cultivate meaningful engagement, tailor your content to the strengths of each social media platform to drive traffic that can convert.
Embrace social listening
Social listening might sound like a marketing buzzword, but it’s actually a free, real-time market analysis. Basic listening searches social media channels looking for mentions of you, your products, competitors, keywords, and any other information that you may need. Advanced tools can identify logos in images and evaluate brand sentiment.
This will give you the inside scoop on how people feel about your company and the features they want. Knowledge alone is not enough. It is important to put the knowledge into practice.
Keep your AI ears open to people asking questions about your industry and for recommendations. You can also join the conversation by leaving a comment or retweeting.
Social listening can be a powerful tool for large-scale strategy stuff, such as positioning and product development. Ben & Jerry’s tracked brand mentions and found that most people enjoyed their ice cream inside during rainy days, as opposed to outside in the sun.
Tip: Use social listening to monitor brand sentiment, and then check it frequently. Sudden negative swing? To stop PR problems from recurring, dig into the root cause.
Get feedback from your audience
While social listening is great, make it a point to engage with your audience. Ask them for their ideas and opinions, or ask fun questions to get to understand them better.
You can run a Twitter or Instagram Stories poll or link to a survey on your social media accounts. Or ask people to leave comments with their responses.
By allowing your customers the space to tell you what they want, you can–unsurprisingly–deliver what they want (#BreakingNews).
Tip: Social media’s primary purpose is to create connections and build a community online. It doesn’t have to be all about the product features. First, build a community.
Social media is a channel for customer service
While promotion and engagement are important reasons to be on social media, the core of social media is about making customers happy. While you may have an email and a phone number, 70% would prefer to resolve problems via social media.
Do you want to go beyond the call of duty? Combining customer service and social listening can help customers who haven’t even reached out to you. Whoa.
A few weeks back, Google Docs stopped saving. This meant that you couldn’t write anything new. This is great when you are on a deadline. To vent my frustrations to fellow writers, I used Twitter. Surprised, Google replied in less than an hour. with helpful advice.
They found it via social listening because I didn’t mention @googledocs when I tweeted. Their customer service was simple and my mood changed from mild irritation to one of admiration. Nice work, Google!
Tip: Customer Service + Social Listening = Recipe for Brand Fans
Before jumping on board, evaluate the trends
Trending topics and popular audio can get more views. But, are they the right type of views? Meaning: Does this meme appeal to your target audience?
You’re not wasting your time trying to find the right content ideas. You could lose your followers or damage your reputation if you follow a trend that your audience isn’t familiar with.
Pro tip Looking for content ideas? These creative ideas are great ideas.
Check your accounts daily
Even if you don’t post every day, make sure someone in your team logs in to reply to comments and DMs and to check for spam.
Not only are they appreciated but also expected to be responsive quickly. Globally, 83% of customers expect a reply to their social media inquiries within 24 hours and 28% within an hour.
Tip: Whether you like it or not, social media continues influencing expectations that businesses must live up to.
Even if you don’t use them, you can still grab account names
TikTok may not be for you. TikTok may not be for you. It’s not a bad idea to save your company’s username for all social media platforms.
This will allow you to keep your options open and prevent potential imposters from using your brand name in order to portray themselves as you. Even if you don’t intend to use the platform, it is worth creating an account to protect your intellectual property and reputation.
Tip: Don’t think it will happen to you. Even celebrities have it happen. After creating fake Twitter accounts, one letter away from the usernames of famous businesspeople, scammers conned people for $80,000,000 in 2020.
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