By Ellie Nash, Digital Account Executive
Whether your business goals are growth, boosting customer engagement or reaching new audiences, social media has a definite role to play – especially used in concert with your wider PR and marketing plans.
But where do you start?
Here are our four tips on improving your social strategy, reaching your social media goals, and improving your online presence.
Connect with Industry Influencers:
Connecting with industry influencers/creators is an important part of enhancing your online presence. You can do this through engagements.
Engagements are where you or your organisation will interact with an industry expert in your field of work who is currently discussing a hot topic that has relevance to your organisation/the services you provide. For example, if you were a healthcare organisation and the Minister for Public Health tweeted something that you feel you could contribute to or provide a valid solution to, don’t hold back, get involved!
Here are some of the benefits:
- Engagements drive more conversation. Especially when reacting to a post with a question, you leave the door open for not only the author of the post to answer but also others viewing the post.
- Engagements pose a greater opportunity to grow followers. If the author responds or others respond to the engagement, they may follow you, especially if they agree with what you’re saying about the topic.
- If your organisation links a blog or whitepaper to the conversation as a solution, this increases the chance of more views and overall engagements.
At Whiteoaks, we would recommend making most of these engagements on Twitter. Twitter is more conversational, casual and is more seamless to find trending hashtags that apply to your industry. If you are planning on engaging with an influencer or creator, possibly consider ending your engagement with a question, such as, ‘What are your thoughts on this?’. This encourages more opportunity for the individual or others to get back to you and get involved.
Use MORE Video:
As the millennial and Gen Z attention span decreases, the demand for short and snappy videos increases. According to a recent infographic by Social Media Today, the average attention span of this generation ranges from 8-12 seconds… And that’s why short-form videos are key!
Now, we’re not pleading with you to set up a TikTok account but keep in mind that short, snappy videos are the way of the future. Videos are becoming so attractive to audiences as it allows them to digest information from videos that are long enough to catch their attention and short enough for them to leave them wanting more.
For the most part, this is a chance to show off the personality of your business, the talent of your team and the fun you have within the office.
Here are a few examples of content that we would recommend you post, depending on the type of business you are:
- How to’s
- Meet the team
- Product highlights
- Humorous videos (get involved in World Hot Dog day or April Fools!)
- Influencer marketing
… These are only a few examples of some of the content that could make your business go viral, be creative!
Implement Paid Social:
Why should you use paid social? It’s not just used to boost organic content. It’s a lot more targeted than that.
So think about targeted content like eBooks, webinars, and whitepapers, leveraging your best content. You can use these to fuel your paid campaigns across platforms, such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. With LinkedIn specifically, there is the opportunity to be really targeted across personas, industry, job title, age, geography, company size… the list goes on. You can use it to find and engage with new audiences.
The key thing about these types of targeted campaigns is that they can be measured, and you can determine your ROI. While paid gets the quick-fire results based on specific campaigns, having organic running concurrently building your brand story and presence provides longevity.
Using both paid and organic social media together makes sense. And when you’re using social as part of a larger PR and marketing strategy, they pack a powerful punch for reaching those objectives – be it lead generation, brand awareness or expansion.
Start using a Social Media Calendar:
Social media calendars are essential to keep your team and content on track and heading in the direction you want it to.
Google sheets is great for hosting your social calendar.
Here are a few of the benefits of implementing a calendar to your strategy:
- Ahead of the next month’s activity, you will go into the document and write in the note tab what needs to be promoted and on what day throughout that calendar month. This keeps everyone aligned with what needs to be pushed onto social, at what time, and on what platform.
- If the social media ideas/blog links are provided a week in advance of writing the schedule, it gives the team time to look through the link and formulate a post. This reduces stress and improves efficiency.
- You will gain more engagement and interaction on posts that you have crafted for specific channels. Rather than copying and pasting the same post over to all of your platforms, use the calendar to review what was posted last week, what went well and what to post the following week. Taking time to fit within the character limit of Twitter whilst also developing the information for LinkedIn.
Social media is an ever-changing world so expect to see a lot of new development in 2022 and make sure to take note of the brands that are harnessing these trends.
