We all have one of those friends who just likes to talk about themselves, actually, if we look deep down, at one time we’ve probably been that friend too. As much as we want to listen and be a good friend by continuing to listen to the amazing things that they’ve done an seen but after awhile, it simply gets tiring. We become exhausted and stop paying as much attention to that person.
Social media is no different. People find it a great place to highlight the amazing things that they’ve done and seen and our natural response is the same, tune out after a while.
From a business perspective, posting to social media is a great way to share with customers and potential customers all of the amazing things that you could do and do do for customers and partners. The risk that you lead, is that you become “that friend” and people become disengaged and essentially you start alienating some of your audience. These days, social has taken over much of the face to face and phone conversations that people used to have in the past so the same social etiquette’s still need to apply.
How to maintain a positive social presence
Managing your social media so that you don’t risk this alienation is really important. When building a social media plan and managing the tactical posts, you need to consider a lot of different types of posts in order to maintain a positive relationship with your followers. In order to do this, you should consider your social posts under three categories:
- Information about you posted by you
- Information about you shared from someone else
- Relevant third party posts shared to your audience
Engagement is critical within social media therefore if you are just talking about yourself continually, your followers will become a bit bored, similar to that friend that we’ve all had or been!
To break down and understand the three types of categories as mentioned above, consider:
- About you
This is information specifically about you as written by yourself. This can include business updates, personal opinions, special offers and posts detailing work that you might have done. - Shared from someone else
If you’ve done a great job – get customers to post about you and then share it! This could include reference to the products or services of yours that they’ve used or just a positive experience that they’ve had. Remember that if you do repost something, always tag in the person who put the original post as recognition of what they’ve said and mark it as #Repost. This is how basic influencer campaigns work within social media. It’s become the new form of PR where individuals with a large following are asked to review and refer their followers on to a particular product. - Third party posts
These posts are where other businesses or individuals have posted something that has some relevance to you, however, isn’t directly linked. This might include advice related to your business or customer interest but you can’t directly refer to a product or service that you have. Again, you need to reference where the article came from and how it relates to you ie. “A good piece of advice on how to keep weeds at bay this summer season from the experts at <Garden Fairies>”. Follow the same rule of tagging and #Repost.
Sharing different types of articles can really help to keep an engaging audience and also allow you to build your social media network. It can also aid in building a positive brand affiliation within the social network, hopefully gaining work.
What about Instagram?
Instagram and Facebook are now essentially one entity, allowing you to directly share your Instagram posts to your Facebook page. Instagram is visual – it is a network of photos / images that you can use to build a portfolio. For businesses, you can use this to share photos of products / service results / displays. The most important piece of information is that you don’t repeat your Instagram posts in Facebook, creating duplicates. You are best to share your Instagram posts so that people can engage with you through their preferred channel. If you don’t feel that Instagram can add value to your business, then you don’t have to use it. Like any form of channel selection, you need to ensure that you are choosing what is right for you and your customer. If photo sharing isn’t going to drive value for your business and you feel that Facebook alone can drive return, focus on Facebook. Social media can be very labour intensive so you need to ensure that you aren’t over extending yourself and not achieving results.
Moving images and videos versus still photos
You now have the opportunity to use videos and create moving boomerang type images on Facebook. Videos and moving images will always create more of an impression and allow you to tell a larger story that just a single image, especially with the pop out feature in Facebook where the video follows the individuals as they scroll through their feed. If you are using videos and moving images, don’t over do it. Keep them short and meaningful – like anything, don’t create it if it isn’t of value to the customer.
How much detail?
When writing your post, keep the detail relevant and also short. People aren’t going to read an entire novel. If you have lots to share, consider having a blog or website that you can drive people to and store all of the detail in there. Your posts should be short.
Don’t use too many hashtags. Remember that a “#” is to create a conversation link and allow people to tag posts with common interest and be tracked that way. Too many will reduce the impact of your post, create too many conversations and also look a little bit silly and overwhelming.
What about the other social media options?
In addition to Facebook and Instagram, there is also Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat and many other social media channels that you can explore depending on your location. The important thing to remember is, depending on your business, some social media channels may not be relevant. Pinterest, for example, allows you to post images and ideas of things that you do that people can then add to their own individual boards. This is probably relevant for more creative business like designers, landscapers, but probably isn’t as relevant for service based businesses. Twitter isn’t a popular as it’s simply sharing of opinions – great for keeping people up to date with news etc but probably doesn’t add as much value as Facebook and Instagram. Snapchat is still evolving but is certainly an interesting way to communicate however due to the non saving of the content it doesn’t allow as much of an opportunity to build brand awareness and educating customers about you.
The most important thing to remember when using social media is to ensure that you remain engaging and interesting. Don’t get stuck with the same conversation and just posting versions of what you’ve done previously. Always update and refresh. Keep the conversation interesting. Follow these tips will help you to go a little way in building a good social media presence. A good tip is to follow other people who have a lot of followers – learn from them and see what they are doing. Don’t copy – just follow and learn.
Good Luck!
The Marketing Elf
© December 2017
The Marketing Elf 
Keep it up Elf
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