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!
I’m still trying to figure out periscope and Snapchat. I can’t imagine the interactions via these networks.
I love helping others grow their businesses- so this is great info to have. Especially when FB is on the decline with views. I wish WE could pick what we want to see!
These are great tips for those using social media to grow their business. It is so important to keep the attention of your audience and not smother them in advertising all the time. Thanks for sharing the tips.
Social media is a great tool. It can make or break you, so be wise in handling it.
SOcial media is tough. There’s so much to combat and life become so fast paced
Nowadays it’s so easy to spend hours staring at your phone while on different social media apps, it’s almost terrifying!
These are definitely important when it comes to managing your social media accounts. I make sure that I schedule ahead of time especially when I’m going to be busy for the following days.
There are so many ways that we can maintain our social media accounts and keep the followers happy! I think these are spot on. Aside from audience interaction, a good content always keeps them coming back for more.
Social media can be such a pain. These are awesome tips. thank you
Me too. I do scheduling in facebook.
It is so hard sometimes. Some people don’t understand this hard job. Thank you for these helpful tips.
I find Facebook to be the hardest one for me to connect with readers. Good reminder for me to post regular “me” posts on social media between the product features!
I found my reach goes down if I post 3x so I stick with 1-3x a day. I try to vary my posts as much as possible but they seem to like pics of my jewelry the best!
I need to utilize scheduling more often. I tend to do things manually.
I thought posting to Facebook once a week was enough – I’ll have to post more often! I’m worried that it’s not worth using at all, because it’s hard to reach my own followers, but I do like sharing my content to relevant groups.
It can be so hard to keep up with social media. I feel like something new happens or comes out far too often, and I start to get used to one platform and a new one pops up. I’m too old to bother.
Thanks so much for this article. I have a blog so i learned a lot with your article. Keep going what u are doing your blog is awesome.
Great tips on social media. I need to up my presence.
It is hard to keep up with social media. There is a lot of good info in this post. And scheduling helps a lot.
It is so hard to keep up with social media and really leverage it to your benefit. There are so many different rules for each outlet.
These are great tips for getting a handle on your social media. I love being able to schedule posts on Facebook.
This is so true, we all tend to check our media more and more. I have things scheduled more now on different days; You have to do not want things, to be all scrunched up. I try and add other things so it’s not all reviews. Thanks for sharing
I love FB scheduling too. I tend to post once a day.
I have my FB scheduled because it makes my life easier. When I found scheduling a while back it changed my social media world. Now I do not over post because I have found it to be annoying and that my audience drops, so I check in once or twice a day and leave it at that.
I try to post at least three times a day – one of my own posts and two other posts in my niche. I know bloggers that post every hour and it works great for them, but that’s just not how I roll. I have a good rapport with my audience and I try to always be helpful and think about their needs.