03/05/2017
Checking social media has become a daily necessity for many of us, as how else would you find out about your boss’s holiday or which celebrity has just died? You are probably already aware of the importance of social media platforms when it comes to marketing your business, but are you really taking full advantage of everything they can bring to your company?
Sites like Facebook have been around for more than a decade and the way they’re being used is ever-changing. Social media isn’t a platform that your business can afford to neglect. Pages that are under-utilised and have an unprofessional aesthetic are going to reflect poorly on your business. However, there are simple ways to combat this, perhaps starting with changing that old, grainy header photo on your Facebook page.
Like any other form of marketing, the more you invest, the more you’ll gain in return – so putting a little more time, effort and money into your profiles could reap reward in the long run. Let’s see how to make yours even better!
Generally, people don’t use social media sites to read novel-length insights, so the way your text is posted can make a huge difference. Just looking at a large block of unbroken text on any platform will seem like a chore to get through and turn readers off, so shorter posts with clear paragraph breaks are more appealing. As humans, we are very visual beings, with our brains processing optical information over 60,000 times faster than text, so taking advantage of visual elements is key for getting more engagement on your social media posts.
Posts with images attached have a 12% higher engagement rate than those without, which means taking time to choose some high-quality images/thumbnails for your publications is going to improve them greatly and help them stand out from the raging sea of content they have to compete against.
The profile pictures you choose for your pages themselves are also important since this is the first thing consumers find on your pages … and therefore the first impression of your business as a whole. If you find that the resolution of your header images is looking poor, it might be time to update. Fear not, as there are a number of online tools available to help such as TinyPNG that can help keep your picture’s quality when changing the size.
While hashtags might not look important, that one extra symbol on your social media posts could make a world of difference to the size of the audience that they reach. Besides bringing focus to the topic, these posts are now discoverable by your current followers and other users searching the same topic, which opens up your posts to significantly more views.
While they’re a great tool for reaching a wider audience, make sure not to go overboard as often less is more. Overloading your posts will make them look unprofessional and spammy, with the optimal number of hashtags for twitter being 1-3 and no more than 5 for Facebook.
Hashtags are a great way to see what’s trending worldwide, so linking your own posts with current news and trends has never been easier. Plus the internet loves humour with comical posts receiving more likes and shares- couple that with some timely tags like #MondayMotivation and you’ve got yourself a formula that could bring more attention to your posts.
So, now you have an idea of how to compose your posts, but how often are you posting? A few times a week? What about the weekends? Mornings or evenings? The benefits of social media marketing are to be as social as possible, so make sure to post consistently but be wise when choosing when to publish your content. You might be an early riser, but Facebook is not, its optimal engagement window is in the afternoon; Linkedin is during the workday Mon-Fri, and as for Twitter, it depends on the tweet. B2B tweets are most popular during the week but B2C almost 20% higher at the weekends, so curate your posts accordingly.
This is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to having optimal use of your social media marketing, so if you’d like some help with improving your pages, make sure to give us a call on 01702 923 614 or check out our own Facebook page for more helpful insights!
