Revitalize Your Social Media Marketing Productivity
“You can’t tiptoe into social media. You have to jump into the pool. People have a natural fear of it. But the scary part is not being there. Your customer is already there.” – Dave Saunders, Founder, Madison Main.
Whether you’re new to using social media content to promote your business or you’ve been engaging customers online for years, finding ways to be more efficient will give you a boost. Analyzing the work that goes into your social media marketing – and the results – will uncover opportunities for improving your marketing efforts.
Tweak your workflow
Define your commitment to social media marketing
If you have business social media accounts and aren’t using them on a consistent basis, decide what you want to do and how much time you’re willing to spend on setting up a system that works for you.
List what’s working and what’s not
Looking at your social media accounts from both your perspective and the audience to determine what’s working and what’s not.
Explore your pain points
Get a clear understanding of the issues behind what is not working: is it lack of time, lack of writing and graphics skill, or lack of a strategic plan.
Get familiar with your options
If you only know Facebook business pages, it’s time to explore the rest of the exciting and ever-evolving social media landscape. Check out Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Look up other businesses and see what they’re posting.
Choose the right platform to reach your audience
Even if you think you know what is the right social media platform to reach your audience, it’s worth monitoring what you’re doing now and looking at the analytics supplied by each platform to see where you get the most traction. If you’re strapped for time and dollars, focus only on creating content for the platform that works best for you.
Fortunately, this doesn’t mean you have to limit yourself to one social media platform. Some platforms have built-in tools to allow you to post across more than one platform simultaneously. For example, you can opt-in to automated cross-platform posting to link your Facebook account to your Instagram account in settings.
Below I’ll introduce you to a tool that will allow you to schedule posts across several platforms from one dashboard.
Always include quality images or video content
Images serve two purposes: they provide visual validation of what you are saying and they capture attention in the never-ending flow of social media posts on your audience’s social media feeds. Keep in mind an image doesn’t have to be a photograph. A graph is a great way to share compelling data to back up your pitch.
If you’re showcasing your product or services, you want them to display them in the best light. Consider hiring a professional to give you a basic library of images or video. Then, decide if your own photos and video meet a basic quality level for your other posts. If they don’t, explore stock photo options. Free stock photos are somewhat limited, but their selection may work for you. Two that I use often are Pexels and Pixabay. A popular paid stock photo vendor is iStock.
Send relevant, stategically timed messages that resonate with your audience
Get the most out of your posts by ensuring they are timed to leverage holidays and seasons. Because the thinking on the best time to posts varies greatly and so many factors determine what is an ideal time to post, experiment with posts on weekdays vs weekends; Mondays and Fridays vs Tuesdays and Thursdays; early morning, noon, late afternoon or evening.
Frequency of posts
To build awareness of your social media presence, post frequently and regularly. Two to three times a week ensures you’ll get noticed, but for some businesses it’s appropriate to post daily updates. If your posts only appear once every two weeks or so, they may get lost.
Appealing design
If you lack computer graphics skills, hire a graphic designer to set you up with templates and elements. For example, a designer can create your logo in several sizes and of transparent and solid backgrounds; design a custom image frame that incorporates your logo and website address; and spruce up the profile image for your social media accounts.
If you want to do it yourself, the free tool Canva enables you to create colorful, visually exciting and interesting images that draw attention on social media feeds.
Coherent, error-free writing
Use spell-check and read everything twice before posting.
Use Google Alerts for inspiration
Use Google Alerts to get news related to your business. You’ll pick some keywords that are relevant to your marketing messages and Google will send you news articles with that word. These articles can inspire ideas for your posts.
Social Media Management Tools
A number of companies offer social media dashboard platforms that allow you to link all your social accounts to a single dashboard. These dashboards make it easy to copy and paste your message to multiple accounts. An added benefit is you can schedule your messages in advance.
All-in-one Integrated Marketing Systems
Platforms like Mailchimp and Constant Contact allow you to consolidate your email marketing and your social media posts. You’ll save time by creating the contact on one platform and multi-purposing messages across your email and social media channels.
Start with small steps
Many factors contribute to a successful social media marketing program. You don’t have to change everything at once – in fact, testing one major change at a time allows you to analyze the impact of each change. The satisfaction you’ll feel with each step you achieve will motivate you to keep tweaking your plan.
Connect with me if you’d like to discuss how you can revamp your social media marketing plan to be more productive and effective.
If you would like to learn more about how this might apply to your business, let’s talk:
