The Do’s and Don’ts of Social Media Marketing
1. Respond Quickly
The purpose of social media marketing is to stay engaged with your followers. If someone comments on a post, messages you, or replies to a tweet, take a few seconds to respond. It is important to make your followers feel as though they have a voice and are acknowledged.
2. Engage Your Viewers
If you want to interact with your followers on social media, you have to encourage it. Do not be needy and beg your followers to “like this post please.” Get creative with things. You can still gain likes and followers, but learn how to disguise them.
Integrate questions into your Facebook posts to engage viewers. For example, if you post a cool or funny picture, do not just ask your audience to “check it out!” Increase interaction rates by encouraging your audience to “caption it” or “fill in the blank,” a tactic that leads to four times as many comments as other posts.
3. Use Images Often
We have found that photos attract more likes, comments, and click-‐throughs than videos, links, and text alone on Facebook. The most compelling photos are self-‐explanatory, like info graphics and charts.
Imagery is extremely helpful for success social media marketing. Image posts drive engagement because photos capture attention and convey a message faster than words. Choose your images carefully and post with a purpose. Just posting a stock image does not do much. Instead, create photo collages, advertisements, and maybe even post some fan photos.
4. Stay Active
Social media moves at a rapid pace, and so should your social media marketing activities. What is “trending” one moment, might be old news within the next hour. It is important to keep your social media pages up to date with current and relatable content. There is no better way to keep your brand relevant than by posting material on a timely basis.
5. It is all about timing.
Once, you know your brand’s best times to post on Facebook, you can start to balance your content strategy between peak and non-‐peak times. For the most effective social media marketing strategy, you want to balance your post times between peak and non-‐peak times. We determined the best time to reach your target audience tends to be a small window of opportunity, ranging from an hour to just a few minutes.
You can track your page’s statistics on the “insights” tab on your administrator’s Facebook page.
As you can see from this graph, the number of fans online is highest between about 7pm to 10pm. There is an average of 10,708 fans online during the Peak Time. The least activity (non-‐peak time) occurs between 12am and 6am, when there are an average of 2, 894 fans online.
Peak Time
Schedule your Facebook posts at the right time—when the majority of your fans are online. You want to catch your audience, not only when they are checking their news feed, but also when they might have a few minutes to click through a link and check something out.
Non-‐Peak Time
Posting at non-‐peak times will increase the chance that fans will view your post. When fewer of your fans are online, you will have less competition for your content. Good Content + Less Competition = High Performance.
6. Don’t Overdo It
Brands often make the mistake of assuming the more often they post, the more engagement and followers they will receive. They ignoring the fact that most people get frustrated and annoyed by constant posts. Consequently, followers may disengage altogether and even unfollow your brand.
Limit your Facebook posts to 2 times per day, at most. Every post should be informative and useful to your followers in some way. Be an ongoing source of timely and relevant information or your likes & comments will begin to drop off dramatically.
7. Proofread
It is important to always make sure to check all posts for grammatical errors before hitting “send.” Getting their/they’re/there confused only makes it seem as though you are not taking the time to really think about what you are posting. Nothing is more unprofessional than bad grammar and spelling.
*Word of advice: prep your social media updates in a Word document before going public just to make sure.
Utilizing social media marketing with Cool Nerds Marketing’s social media specialist to design and manage your social media accounts can increase your customer base and keep your current customers informed of what your company has to offer.
