Okay. So far this month, we’ve talked about laying the groundwork for your brand’s social media, choosing which platforms you should focus on, and we’ve given you some strong campaign planning strategies. Now it is time to get down to the real nitty-gritty when it comes to social media management for your brand. The actual DOING of all the things.
So, you guessed it, in this blog post we’re going to explore key strategies for:
- Posting to Your Accounts- best practices for posting your content
- Advertising- how, where, and how much to spend
- Presence Management- what to do after your posts go live
Let’s jump right in!
Best Practices for Posting Your Brand’s Content on Social Media
Whether your business is brand new to the social media world or you’re just taking a refreshed look at your strategy (which you should definitely do from time to time), it is good to start with the basics.
How many posts per week or per month do you want to be publishing?
You’ll undoubtedly see large brands from time to time that put out content every single day. But rest assured, you do not need to follow their lead in order to achieve an authentic connection with your target audience. In fact, here at Spry, we would argue that posting too much content could come off as if you’re just blasting out information as quickly as possible without pausing to support that content and/or build real authentic connection and relationships at the after-party.
On the flip side, you don’t want to post too infrequently or you’ll likely find that your content is quickly lost in the hub bub that is your audience’s social media feed.
We feel that 2 to 3 posts each week seems to maintain a good balance of being present in their sights without becoming annoying or repetitive.
You should also take the platform you’re working on into account. For Facebook, Instagram feed posts, and LinkedIn – generally posting in that 2-3 posts per week range is great. On Twitter, being shorter bits of content, you could consider sending tweets out more often, or at least getting in and retweeting content from accounts that align with your goals. Instagram stories are often posted quite frequently, multiple times per day, but are more in-the-moment and less curated. Your audience for IG stories won’t generally bat an eye if you hastily put something up that maybe has a typo or doesn’t feel very polished.
Batch Your Content Creation for Efficiency and Cohesion
We also like to point out that we recommend working on your content in batches and following one or several central themes (“campaigns”) throughout a specific timeframe or in general.
By working on content ahead of time and scheduling pieces out in advance, you can build a more cohesive structure and feel to your content overall. If you try to just create a post individually each time you think you need to put something out, your whole account may end up feeling a bit jumbled and less professional. And you’re more likely to get busy and forget to put up that post you were planning, or procrastinate it off the schedule.
Social Media Advertising Strategies
The fact is, as a business account, on many (most?) social media platforms, it’s really barely worth your time to post at all if you’re not putting some advertising funds behind your post content.
For example on Facebook, when you post a piece of content to your business page, only a small percentage of the people that follow your page will even see your content if you do not boost it with ad dollars. Your top fans, those that seek out your content and react or engage with it regularly, will often see your posts but others, even people who like your page, will usually not be ‘fed’ your content by the algorithm.
Plus, if you think about it, are the people that already like your page really the people that you need to see your content? Probably not. They already know about you. Already like you. And possibly are already a customer of yours.
You need to find NEW people to expose to your brand and your services or products. Hence, advertising.
The good news is that you don’t really need to spend all that much money to get your content seen by a large number of people!
As a brand, you’ll need to look at your budget, priorities, and goals and decide how much you want to spend on your social media advertising. (Psst- want some personalized help figuring this out? We’d love to help! Contact us!)
For many of our clients, we recommend an ad budget of $10-$35 per post that they’re putting out. This will boost the content out to their TARGETED audience (it’s important to note that these are not random people – you’re able to select all kinds of demographics and interests for your ad audiences so that you can get your content in front of the people that you want to be seeing it). We also like to use a small percentage of the monthly advertising budget to grow the account’s community through Page Likes ads.
Also, when you get likes and reactions on your posts through advertising, many of the people engaging in this manner will be people that do NOT already like your page. Facebook has a feature that will easily allow you to go in and invite those people to like your page. Take advantage of this to grow your community.
Presence Management for Your Brand’s Social Media Accounts
One super important, key thing to remember here is that you can’t expect to see a whole lot of success by just blasting out content and throwing ad dollars at everything. You’re trying to create AUTHENTIC connections. Build a fan base of people that KNOW, LIKE, and TRUST your brand.
You need to engage with the people that see your content. Start and continue conversations. Be a human.
Much of the technology world can be automated these days. Robots can manage social media accounts. But they can’t engage in authentic human conversation that will draw people to your business and earn their love and support.
Tips & Tricks for Building A Community Ready to LOVE Your Brand
Ask questions in your posts to encourage response from those that see your content. When somebody does answer a question or comment on your post, re-engage! Acknowledge their comment, thank them if appropriate, and try to continue the conversation. Ask another question if you can so that you can try to get them to respond again.
Remember to keep your brand’s tone in mind (this is something that you should already be familiar with) and always stay professional and courteous.
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