If you don’t know which social media platform is right for you or how you should be using it, don’t worry - you aren’t alone!
Staying up-to-date with the daily changes made to social media algorithms whilst posting consistently can be a mammoth task.
Fortunately our digital executive, Freya M, is here to help!
Let’s start at the very beginning…
The very first thing you ought to do is determine which social media platforms would work best for you and your business. There’s no point creating profiles for your business on every platform available if it doesn’t suit your brand identity. There’s even less point if you don’t think you’ll ever find the time to post on it!
If you’re struggling to work out which social platforms your business should be on, here’s a quick overview of what each platform is typically used for.
Facebook - The most popular social media platform, with over 2.91 billion monthly users, this platform is most commonly used by businesses wanting to communicate directly with their consumers.
LinkedIn - Typically used by businesses and business professionals to share job opportunities, business news, behind the scenes content, and personal accomplishments. It also offers great opportunities for communicating B2B.
Instagram - Known as ‘the visual platform’, Instagram is typically used by a younger audience to share photos of their life. As a business, this platform can be used to share pictures of the team, products and of happy customers. As consumers love seeing the people behind a business, this is an excellent way to connect with your target market.
Twitter - The communication platform! Users communicate on this platform in short messages, up to 280 characters long, called tweets. This platform is an excellent way to share current news and information in an informal way, and is also expected to increase its word count to 4,000 characters which would open up more opportunities for businesses.
Google Business - This platform helps ensure people come across your business when looking for products or services like yours online. Working best for businesses that use specific SEO terms in their digital communications, Google Business places you right in front of a potential customer exactly when they are looking for a business like yours - and gives them the tools to get in touch with you straight away.
Each of these platforms will have optimal posting times where it expects to reach the most amount of people in your target audience. It’s up to you to determine what time is best for your business, either by trial and error posting, creating a persona of your target consumer or by researching.
It’s just doing a little bit of social media, right?
Hands up if you’ve got a dusty business profile that needs a little life brought back into it? If your hand is raised, you’re not alone.
We see businesses neglecting their social media on a daily basis, all because they’re too busy doing everything else their job role includes - and we don’t blame them! You wouldn’t expect a finance manager to pick up the slack in HR, just as you shouldn’t expect them to pick up the slack on your social media.
After all, if you’re doing it properly it’s not just a five minute task every now and then, it’s a job in itself.
It’s writing content, creating graphics, responding to comments, replying to messages, interacting with other posts to make the algorithm happy, staying up-to-date with what’s going on in the world and social media trends, looking at the month ahead to see what might be worth sharing, gathering customer feedback, analysing the insights and analytics of previous posts and interactions to guide future content and so much more!
So, what can you do to ensure your social media doesn’t get neglected?
- Create a social media plan for the year, with key awareness days and events relevant to your business.
- Create high quality graphics and imagery that resonate with your audience.
- Schedule content to go out on a certain date, at a specific time. You can do this through most platforms, or you can use a social media management tool such as Sendible or Hootsuite.
- Check the performance of your platforms via insights and analytics so you can see what is working and what’s not.
- Work with an agency to ensure there is high-quality content being regularly posted on your profiles.
If we can help you and your business in any way - whether that’s through social media setup, content creation or training you and your team on how to use each platform to its full potential with our one-to-one Two Hour Takeovers, please get in touch by emailing us at info@jandpr.com or calling the office on 01952 951263.
