What does it take to manage the social media channels of a digital marketing blog? Here are 22 things I’ve learned.
Having social media channels is a useful tool for any businesses whether small or big. It helps you connect with your customers and listen to their queries but also find out what they are looking for.
1. Complete the page details
Whether it is your Facebook page or any other social accounts, make sure it has all the details pertaining to your business and how your followers can get in touch with you. It adds to your credibility and helps non-followers find you easily.
2. Share content relevant to your niche
Relevant content on your social media channels helps your followers find the purpose of your products or services. This gets even better if you add some humor taste. The end result should help your followers find the relevancy of your product in their daily life.
3. Have evergreen content
Evergreen content can be shared over again and again; but not excessively. This can be Top Things to do over a long weekend.
4. Interact with your audience
If you want your audience to interact with you, you must first make the step yourself. Create engaging posts that will entice your audience to participate in the discussion or eventually like, comment and share them. You should also make sure to respond in a timely way.
5. Do not spam your followers
Yes, we agree—we all want to grow our reach on social media in a short time. One big mistake is to over-share or posting within short intervals without letting your audience to engage with the posts. Do not spam! You are not a parrot!!
6. Do not oversell. Entertain instead
Related to the previous point, do not oversell your products without really informing your audience. Promos, bonuses, and discounts are great, but nothing compares to good information leading your followers to become real advocates. Entertain through How To’s, testimonials, tutorials.
7. Have really cool graphics
It is proven that social media posts with great graphics engage more followers. Make sure to have the correct sizes according to your channel. For instance, Facebook requires a picture of 403×403 pixels for a common post. Bigger ones are cropped—not really good in terms of visual outlook.
8. Avoid poor grammar
Ever heard of bad grammar is bad for your brand? Well, this is true. It makes your brand looks unprofessional and having a poor eye for details. To help you in mastering great grammar, you may use online tools such as Grammarly. It is not about writing in a Shakespearean way. Rather, it is writing a language your customers will understand.
9. Keep the message consistent in all your channels
Having a consistent message across your different channels is one of the basics of any successful marketing campaign. With all the noise happening over the internet, having some consistency in your content creation and distribution definitely increase your reach.
10. Have storytelling
People connect to what they can relate to. This also applies to your social media marketing. Storytelling adds some credibility to your brand when it involves your own customers and eventually your advocates.
11. Use different media types (Videos, Gif, Pictures, etc)
Depending on your channels, it is always good to have diverse media types to share your ideas. You should keep in mind that sizes and appearance may vary according to the channel. For instance, Facebook requires 403×403 pixels pictures for its news feed.
12. Understand your audience through analytics
You may have the best strategies but if these are not reaching out to the right segment or audience, then it is useless efforts for your brand added to the fact that you might be losing money. So, go through your channels analytics and see how your audience is responding to your content. You may use Cyfe or for advanced community managers, Google Analytics.
13.Provide customer service (Even if you are not online)
If you are selling a product or services, your social media channels might be great tools to respond to the queries of your customers and to provide customer service. But, it can be hard to keep someone 24/7 on your channel to respond to queries.
14. A/B test your content
The recent amendments to Facebook algorithm made it more difficult for organic content to reach your followers. The solutions here is to create targeted content for your audience or boost your posts even if Facebook recently removed 5000 target filters.
However, it is always good to have two versions of the same content and measure which one is doing fine. This provides good information on how your followers perceive your content.
15. Have a calendar set up
Great social media content has a flow and forms part of a well-defined plan including objectives and end results to be met. There should always be a certain level of consistency in your publishing schedule. If someone knows there will be good alouda every Monday, chances are he will come back the next Monday.
16. Automate, but not so much
Automation comes in handy when you want to publish materials which don’t really focus on engaging your followers. These can be blog posts, white papers or free resources. On the other side, automation doesn’t really work out for content where you need to give instant replies. Back then, we used to send letters and wait for a reply for weeks. Well, this is not really how it should be on social media.
17. Create your own character
Consider your social media page as a living entity with a defined character. This add-on to the experience your brand is providing online. Character may include your copywriting style and visuals. For instance, the way we speak to our followers is completely different from how other agencies are doing it with their followers. Here again, consistency is key.
18. Do your research and find out what is trending
One way to generate traffic to your page is to publish content which is trending at the moment. You have various online tools which are quite useful. These include Buzzsumo and Google Trends.
19. Give credits
Give credits to the content you are sharing on your page. Besides being ethical, you also create relationships with influencers who add up credibility to your work. You may as well ask for a reshare of your next social media posts.
20. Handle detractors properly
It is a fact—you won’t be able to please everyone. You should keep in mind that having a social media page is like being in a public arena where everyone notices everything. How you manage the negatives is what defines your brand. Online reputation management is a whole aspect of online marketing where you make sure to respond and monitor any comments appearing on the internet. For this, you may opt for social mentions or Google alerts.
21. Use links to bring traffic to your website
Social media is a way to listen and interact with your followers. It also helps you to funnel traffic to your website where all the magic happens. Your followers may become a lead whom you can convert to a customer and eventually an advocate. So, use links such as a blog post or your product description on your different social media channels. The key point here is not to oversell your products or services.
22. Ask questions and opinions
As a way to understand your customers better, asking for opinions and questions helps you build strong and close relationships. This can be in the form of a poll or a survey. Using this information, you will be able to craft relevant and needed content for your followers
