When social media emerged as a new and exciting tool for connecting people, businesses made accounts and posted anything and everything, from what their teams were doing to which new product was being launched.
Each social platform had its own value-add, and the techniques for reaching out were a bit ‘scatter-gun’.
Social media has quickly evolved to play an important part of any inbound marketing strategy, with businesses able to directly target their people in their buyer journey, curate content they know will be shared and engaged with, and grow their brand presence across well-defined audiences.
Let’s take a look at how each platform can be used by small businesses.
This broadly conversational platform offers businesses direct access to consumers through the creation of business pages, but what should you do if somebody ‘likes’ your page?
The likelihood is that they want to receive updates on new products and information, or they’re interested in events that you’re attending or hosting. Ultimately, the platform can be used to share knowledge, so any insights you have had or come across should be posted to the platform, with a message aimed at starting a conversation with your followers. Remember that visual content rules the web, and the cliché of ‘an image speaks 1,000 words’ rings true.
Try sharing different types of content to see what resonates with your audiences, be that video, news articles, blog posts etc. Once you know what they like most, you’ll have a plan going forward.
While you could in theory post all the time, dominating your follower’s news feeds is a major faux-pas. Socialbakers ran a study into this and found that engagement dropped off a cliff for businesses posting more than twice a day, as well as for businesses posting only once per week. You’ll need to find that fine balance through testing to see how your audience reacts best to your sharing. One update each day is a good rate for most businesses, but don’t be alarmed if you miss a day’s posting.
Remember that your business updates will appear on people’s feeds alongside photos of their holidays, their friends’ weddings, and videos of their new nieces and nephews’ first steps. So don’t take yourself too seriously, be casual, and focus on delivering value.
Read more: How to boost a Facebook post
With a 280 maximum of characters available per tweet, there’s a certain amount of freedom in what can be posted.
Businesses that find success on Twitter tend to tweet a wide range of content from product promotions to online contests, general questions to their audience, funny thoughts about their industry, data or recent research insight, and latest news. As with Facebook, visual content performs well so don’t forget to illustrate your tweets with suitable images. Also, mention people’s handles and stay on top of latest # trends to ensure your messages reach the right people.
At 6,000 tweets per second (February 2020), it’s a cluttered platform and cutting through the noise can be tough. Posting many times per day will increase your chances of getting noticed by your followers and of boosting engagement.
As with Facebook, your focus should be on providing value to your followers, though take advantage of the more relaxed atmosphere you’d find on Twitter compared to more corporate platforms like LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is ‘the’ platform for business professionals to network and meet people in your field of work. Your LinkedIn followers will likely care more about the information you share with them, or the insights you bring.
The platform is great for video content, so get yourself a tripod and a microphone ready for when an idea comes to you and share your thoughts with your community.
Weekly posts on LinkedIn should be sufficient. Make sure to encourage your employees to share insights with their followers - this is a great way to get your brand out there without oversharing on your own feed. For more tips, check out our guide to how brokers can make the most of LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is a professional platform for people to connect, so ensure your content reflects that sense of community-building. Your content should provide readers with tips on improving themselves and their way of working, or give them insight into new products.
Remember that articles with an image enjoy a 2x higher conversion rate than articles without.
Read more: How to boost content on LinkedIn
A ‘how to’ video is among the top four most popular types of content on YouTube. Your audience will be looking for videos explaining content that would otherwise sit in very long blog articles where they don’t want to spend the time dissecting what they need.
Therefore, if you have longform content on your website that isn’t getting the engagement you were expecting, try applying it to the video format. If you’re worried about length, 2 minutes should be ideal.
As much as you can, as long as quality doesn’t suffer. The more content you produce, the more views you’ll get. Then, using the insights into referral traffic from the platform you’ll know whether it’s a channel you should continue to invest in.
Ensure you optimise for SEO, tag your videos correctly and use catchy titles. Using cards and calls to action will help send traffic back to your site. Remember also to check out your competitors, comments and your audience to understand what content resonates well with your followers.
Read more: How social media can help scale up your business
Once you’ve mastered these platforms, the next step is tracking. You’ll want to dedicate resources to where you get most value, so ensure you’re armed with the right data analytics tools for each platform. The more data you collect, the more data you’ll be able to react to. So get social, and good luck!
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