Keeping up with Social Media

Whether you have a business or you’re on social media for personal use only, it can be a daunting task to stay up to date. All of the new updates for each platform, user interface changes, interacting with fans or customers, it gets exhausting! In this article, I’ll talk about the business social media accounts. Keeping up with social media is important for a few reasons. For businesses or blogs, it’s important to stay up to date and interact with your audience and customers. It’s also important to stay active. Now, with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Tumblr and more, it’s pretty hard to stay active every single day, right? Here are some tips for keeping up with social media. Let’s get started.

Scheduling

I’m going to be using Facebook as an example throughout this whole article. So let’s take Facebook and say you have a business page. You’ve got a couple hundred likes and you’re growing, but you’re not growing as fast as you want, am I right? Let me ask you this; how many times are you posting? What kind of content are you posting? If you answered “once a day” and “my own content”, let me stop you there. Try upping the amount of times you post daily. Try three times a day. A great way to do this is to find what times of the day your page’s audience is most engaged. There’s a tool that will help you figure this out, as well as allow you schedule posts. Buffer and Hootsuite are awesome options for this.

As for the type of content you’re sharing on social media, you should be sharing your own content of course, but at least one of your daily posts should be someone else’s. What do I mean by that? Let’s say you have a travel blog. You post your travel post at 10 AM, and at 1 PM you post something that’s relevant to the same niche. For example, something about saving money on airline tickets. Pretty easy right?

Interacting with Your Audience

Finally, the reason you probably started social media accounts for your brand in the first place; interacting with your audience or customers. There’s a bit of a science behind this, although it won’t work for every brand. Let’s break it down into a couple different sections.

Complaints & PR Problems

Someone just bought something from you, and for some reason, it wasn’t up to their standards. They’ve taken to your Facebook page and left a very public comment or even wrote on your ‘Timeline’. Now, current and most importantly, new customers can see this. There are a couple different ways to handle this. What would you do? Here’s a suggestion. Reply publicly. Show your customers and prospective customers that you take customer service seriously. Whether you apologise for their inconvenience and then offer to send them a private message to resolve the issue, or you try to resolve the issue publicly. Either way, remember that what the way you respond reflects not only on you but on the brand that you’ve built.

Sponsored Posts and Selling

People don’t like salesmen, but they love a good sale. Coming across as spammy, i.e. posting your deals every day, or if “check out this awesome product” is a post that you regularly put up every day, you’re going to lose your audience. Be tactful. If you’re posting to affiliate programs, mention it’s an affiliate link. (Not doing so will also get you into some hot water with Facebook too, so be sure to disclose it!)

In closing, don’t be spammy, be professional, tactful, and have a general care for your audience. Without your customers or your audience, your brand wouldn’t get very far. Take care of them, and they’ll take care of you.

How do you keep up with social media? Do you have any tips that you can share with us? Let’s swap ideas!