Welcome back! So, you’ve read last week’s BCRS blog (I’m hoping so as it was fabulous!) and now you have a social media page/s that’s right for you. Now I’m guessing you are ready to create some great content to engage your audience.
What to post:
A balance of three components is key in order to get the right message across to your audience without being ‘pushy’ and over-selling your product/ service. This consists of self-promotion, value-adding content and interaction.
Your customers must be able to trust your business. Creating content that purely sells your product or service will not gain trust with your audience as well as you might think.
Value-adding content is vital to be able to fully engage your audience. This type of content does not sell your service directly but gives the audience a look into the ‘human’ element of your business. Post about events that team members are attending, awards the business has been nominated for and general team activities that make your business more ‘human’.
In addition to this, interaction with comments and shares of your posts are important to ensure your audience knows that you are engaging with them. Don’t just simply ‘like’ a post, comment and share to show you are interested in your audiences’ opinions.
With all that being said – self-promotion should not be ignored! Afterall you are aiming to sell your product or service as a result of all of this hard work. However, create content that is visually impressive to your audience. Images are more likely to gain more engagement than blocks of text. Videos also create larger engagement than static images.
When to post:
To catch your audience at the right time it is important to post at the right times of day and frequency to enable maximum visibility of your posts.
As mentioned in my last blog post, Linked-In is more suited for B2B marketers. The frequency of posts is at least one-two per week to maintain audience engagement. Also consider the times of day you post your content. It is recommended to post during ‘normal’ business hours (9-5 Monday to Friday) generally. The best engagement will happen during commuting hours in the morning and evening and at lunch times.
As for twitter, engagement is maintained by quantity of posts, averaging at six per day. This is due to the large volume of posts published on twitter each day, your posts can be ‘lost’ in a twitter feed unless high frequency is maintained. The times to post are varied dependent on your audience. B2B audiences should be targeted during business hours (9-5 Monday to Friday) however if you operate B2C you may also wish to consider posting on weekends and evenings in designated Twitter hours for maximum exposure.
Instagram has similar timing rules to twitter as they are based off the same audience type (B2B and B2C). However, the frequency of posts is much less due to a lower capacity of posts being published on newsfeeds. The frequency of posts for Instagram is two-three times per week.
How to post:
A busy schedule can sometimes feel like it gets in the way of being able to create perfect engaging content and ensure these posts go out on time. This is where a scheduling platform becomes a ‘life saver’. This way you can concentrate on the quality of your posts in one foul swoop.
Hootsuite is a scheduling platform that enables you to schedule posts across all your social media platforms to be able to engage with your audience at the right times. If you’re only using Twitter, ‘Tweetdeck’ is the best way for you to schedule tweets in advance.
*For more information on these platforms click the links at the end of this post.
