Words from our Interns: Episode 4
Hello everyone and welcome to week 4 of the intern blog series. Social media has become a major tool for companies across the globe and for the most part, people have mastered it. This week, we compiled some best practices for different platforms from our perspectives to amplify your company and your message!
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This 14 year old social media platform has become an essential for human interaction and entertainment. In fact, within the past few years, it has created a huge marketplace for businesses to grow online and expand their reach and engagement with their old, new, and future customers. Facebook has approximately 8 million small businesses registered and nearly 2 billion users. If your company has a social media manager, they should check your account once a day and post content at least twice a week. Here are few other things to consider:
- Do not create a personal profile for a business or organization. Instead, create a separate public page that can be managed through Ad manager or Facebook Pages.
- Avoid posting the same status on Facebook and other platforms as they all have a different tone, audience, and frequency of posts. Both the updates should be unique although hashtags can be similar.
- Pay attention to your insights! They are your guide to future content, potential audience, and engagement.
- Attract through your visuals. Keep statuses short and simple, get creative with graphics, and increase your video content.
- Last but not least, let your audience talk. Customer feedback helps a lot and increases your engagement as a company. Posting content that increases engagement gets the business page recognized.
One of the largest social media sites in the world is Twitter. Many people rely on Twitter to get their news updates on what’s going on in the world as well as updates on their favorite celebrities and companies. Here are 5 best practices for making the most out of your company’s Twitter account:
- Post at peak hours. If you post when a large amount of people are using the app, your post is more likely to be seen.
- Use relevant hashtags. Using hashtags ensures you’re reaching the desired audience and can even be helpful in encouraging a call to action.
- Include a call to action. Twitter movements are powerful and impactful; when used right, this tool can make a huge difference.
- Encourage internal support. This doesn’t just pertain to Twitter but when something is posted on the company account, encourage all members of the company to like and promote the tweet!
- Plan a strategy to deal with negativity. Negativity is a dominant presence on social media and how you handle it reflects your company and its values; being mature and polite ensures the best, most civil outcome.
When you think about LinkedIn, the first thing that may come to your mind is a business platform for professionals. Yes, LinkedIn may be viewed as a professional platform, but how do you stand out among the variety of professionals and businesses? Two words: provide value. How do you provide value?
- Decide on your outlook. What does your personal or business brand represent?
- Then, decide the message you want to convey and its purpose. Center the message tone around the professional target audience. Some questions to consider are:
- How widespread is this message and how can you personalize it to make the message unique?
- Is the message persuasive, informative, or providing an opinion?
- It is significant to provide something without reiterating the same information available anywhere else.
- Decide which publishing content would be best for the message being conveyed?
- LinkedIn offers the ability to post articles and posts. In either instance, insert a picture or graphic when possible and make it visually appealing and utilize hooks to gain instant attention.
- In either instance, insert a picture or graphic when possible and make it visually appealing and utilize hooks to gain instant attention. For instance, personalize the content to make the post/story relatable to the audience.
Instagram has evolved into something more than it anticipated. Many people are now starting careers as influencers accross various industries through the platform. How does this all happen? Well with accurate marketing skills that catches users’ attention. The use of pictures, videos, and customizable, unique features make the app stand out when it comes to digital marketing. People and companies have several options to market their brand or products. Here are a couple of tips that will set you apart from others:
- When you plan on posting something to your profile or story, make sure you know what you’re posting. If people have questions about something, it would be courteous to respond as soon as you can.
- Keep your profile active and unique to its own. You can keep a certain aesthetic/theme to your profile. (business profile vs. personal profile).
- Make the profile easily accessible by providing quick appropriate information.
- Find the right times to post. Posts usually do well from 9am-10:30am (when people wake up and head to work), from 12pm-3pm (lunch/break time), etc.
YouTube
You might think that YouTube is all about music, fun, and all that good stuff. Well, you are right, but there is more to YouTube than what the eye sees. From a business perspective, YouTube has proven to be a major marketing platform. This should not come to us as a surprise given that 86% of people want to see more videos from brands in 2020.
- The promotion of your business starts with having a YouTube channel.
- Your channel won’t get you results until you actively engage with it: upload content regularly and share that content regularly on other social media platforms.
- Encourage your viewers and customers to like the videos and subscribe to the channel. This will ensure that your clients keep getting informed about new products as soon as you introduce them.
- Ideally, the length of the videos should not exceed a minute. You want the videos to be on-point, short, and captivating.
Bring It All Together
Make the most out of your social media presence by staying professional, but being authentic. Each platform is different and not all of them will be right for your business. Knowing the differences between each platform and how to best utilize them will help you reach the right audience. With these tips in mind, your social media venture will be successful!