What to Do & What to Avoid with Social Media
When used right, social media can be essential in the growth of your company. Though it may seem superficial at times, reaching your target audience in an authentic way only can boost your business and build your brand out digitally.
As an award-winning digital marketing agency, we’ve worked tirelessly to figure out how to use various social media platforms efficiently and we’ve come up with a few timeless tenets you can use for yourself or your business.
What to Do with Social Media
What to do with social media may seem obvious at times,
- Post Regularly: Consistency is key with social media. Posting whenever you feel like is not the best approach, but creating a content calendar is a great first step. You can also plan your posts in advance along with small campaigns and aligned hashtags to boost your success. And meeting those small deadlines will eventually build out your company’s reach and success in the long run.
- Interact With Your Followers: When people comment on your posts, tag them and comment back. When people share your posts, share theirs or write a comment. When people tag you, like it and comment on it. It’s a bit of work, but engage, engage, engage. When you reach out to people through your business, you’re validating them and your customer service authenticity. Do everything you can to keep people coming back to your page.
- Use Visuals: Keep it interesting. Unless you’re a celebrity on Twitter, no one is going to really read your only worded post. Add enticing visuals, from beautiful photos to infographics to illustrations. It will boost your engagement and have people stopping their endless scrolling at your post!
Pro tip: Instagram changed their algorithm to recognize faces and boost those images on your feed. Having a typography-oriented post is going to fall down peoples’ feeds.
It’s a bit of work overall, but the social media game requires attention and consistency. Start with your calendar and then start plotting your posts!
What to Avoid With Social Media
The list of what to avoid goes on, but we’ve curated some major pitfalls that we’ve seen business and personal accounts do.
- Spam: We have all seen this person, but don’t be someone who posts too much and spams peoples’ feeds. You may have some great content ideas and some inspiration in the moment, but spread it out over a few days. Social media users tend to unfollow spammers, and that could really hurt your business.
- Overuse hashtags: When your caption is short but your hashtag list looks like a CVS receipt, people on social media are going to question your reputation. And when they question your reputation, you begin to appear less solid overall. There’s no mathematical equation for the right number of hashtags, but don’t abuse them. Start by sticking to a few in your industry, and use more from there to match the content of the post.
- Forget to Tag People And Locations: This one is a pitfall we see a lot of companies doing, largely because it doesn’t seem important. Tag your location in your posts to give it a geotag, so that other people can find you. Tag the people—or even other companies—in your posts to boost the chance of discovery of your business. Tagging locations and people only helps create online community and will allow other social media users to discover your business.
Keep It Real
If you’re reading this, chances are you are a person. You exist in the world, you have experiences, you have opinions, and you have taste. Additionally, you can tell when someone is trying too hard and being inauthentic.
Our biggest piece of advice is to be authentic, whether it’s to yourself or your brand image and identity. People can smell BS a mile away, and it keeps them running away from it on social media.
For example, use appropriate images for your business. Maybe stock photos work. Maybe for your business they feel tacky and you should take a nice photo with your phone camera.
When you’re real with your target audience, they feel respected and respect you back. When you’re pushing too hard to sell or trying too hard to present yourself in some kind of way, they can feel duped and lose trust in your company and brand. And you definitely don’t want to lose any points with your business on social media.
Get A Pro to Run Your Business’s Social Media
Social media can be a bit of a monster to tackle for your business. But this means that if you’re putting in the effort, you’re doing it right. If you don’t take it seriously, your social media won’t work for you, and you may seem lazy or unsuccessful to your followers.
But if you’re still having doubts about your efficacy, or just want to go to the next level, reach out to the professionals. Our company has lifted emerging and already successful businesses on social media with sharp copy, gorgeous design, and solid campaigns. Social media is an important tool in digital marketing, and mastering it is vital to your company’s success.
