Hey Social Media, Can We Be Friends?
Ok, let’s get real here for a second, social media… is hard work! It seems to be an ongoing struggle for every business, but it’s such a useful tool that knowing how to use it properly is so important! And with the way technology is today, in some cases, it could be the difference between success or failure.
It seems like every week Facebook is changing this feature and Instagram is adding that feature and SnapChat is… well SnapChat.
The other struggle that we all have as small businesses is: how do we capture our customers’ attention with engaging content that will either bring them into your retail store to buy something or drive them to buy online. In a world where dogs and cats and other cute animals can get 1000 followers overnight and we are struggling to just get 20 likes/comments/shares on a post, how can we compete with the Grumpy Cats of the world?
But let’s be honest, each and every one of us is guilty of it too! We scroll past everything in our NewsFeed – someone’s dinner, engagement announcements, picture of their kids, etc. - but the second we see a funny animal video, we not only watch it, we typically show some sort of reaction, tag a friend or two in the comments below, and then proceed to share it! Everything that small businesses WANT to happen on each of their posts.
So how can we do it too? Here are some of the tips that I have learned as of late, hopefully they will be helpful to you as well!
1. DON’T Sell All The Time
This is something that can be hard for businesses to understand. Especially when that is your overall goal, to sell something. But, this can’t be all you’re posting about on your social media pages, or your customers will very quickly get bored of seeing your posts, or even worse, might stop following you altogether! You should only be posting “sales” posts about 10-20% of the time on your social media pages. So in terms of a week, if on average you’re posting twice a day on Facebook, that’s 14 posts, so only 1-3 of those posts should actually be something driving people to buy. Crazy right? If you’re a guilty one, posting more than that in a week, don’t worry, we are too! But we can learn and grow together!
2. DON’T Connect Your Social Pages
This is a bit of a tough one, but I mainly mean, don’t connect your Facebook to your Twitter. Facebook and Instagram work pretty seamlessly together, so there isn’t much harm in sharing your Instagram post to your Facebook, but watch your hashtags. You don’t want your post to be 10 words and then have 30 hashtags that follow, edit your post to only have a few relevant hashtags if you’re posting to Facebook. As for the Facebook to Twitter connection, when these two accounts are connected, your Facebook post goes to Twitter, but as a link. People don’t like to have to click to read more, especially if it’s going to redirect them to your Facebook. The key takeaway here is: it’s great to share your content on all your social platforms, but just make sure to optimize the post to the platform. Each platform reaches a different audience, so you have to speak to them in their language.
3. DO Make Your Content Fun
Think about it, why do we all like animal videos so much? Because they’re funny! Create some content for your social media pages that is funny! Use GIFs, Memes, and videos to get your point across. The internet is full of them, so the creation part is already done for you, you just have to find them and then make it relevant to whatever it is you’re posting! Have some fun with your social posts, it’s not all business all the time!
4. DO Post Content Not Necessarily Related to Your Business
Take this blog post for example, we're an escape room company, but we're writing a blog about social media! Often businesses feel like they only need to post things that are about their business or industry. If you’re in the car industry, you have to post cars all the time… this is not true! If you happen to be scrolling through your NewsFeed and see something interesting, and you have something meaningful to say about it. Share it with your followers. This creates a dialogue between you and your customers, and they get to have that human connection with your business. It’s really easy to forget that there are humans behind everything that gets posted to the web. Human connection is a very important part of business, it creates loyalty and trust with your customers.
5. DO Facebook & Instagram Live
If you have something to say and it’s really exciting or something that would be a really quick video, do it Live! When you go live, everyone on you page gets a notification that you’re live and if they can, will tune in! Live videos can be scary because if you mess up or say something stupid (or in my case do weird hand movements), everyone sees it in real time, there’s no do-overs! But who cares! Embrace your weirdness and go live! People don’t have a long attention span, so the likelihood of them reading a long post versus watching a 1 minute video are slim to none. Not to mention all social media platforms seem to be favouring video over photos or text based posts, which means people are more likely to organically see your video over your other posts.
Do you have any tips or tricks that you've learned through running your various social media profiles? We would love to hear about them!
Post below in the comments and if we get enough, we will compile all ideas into another blog!