Social Media Tips

Facebook                                          

Don’t forget to create a Facebook page for your business not another personal profile.  Make sure you categorise your page correctly to make the task of finding your business via a Facebook search as easy as possible.

Fill in all of your business essential information including name, address, contact details and website.

Create a well branded Facebook cover photo the ideal size is 851x315 pixels and reinforce your brand identify with the smaller profile photo.

Don’t hard sell. This is very important. People aren’t generally looking to buy stuff on Facebook. Show them something genuinely interesting.

Encourage conversation by asking people questions.

Keep it brief. Save the long copy for your blog page.

Post photos and videos to your timeline. Research suggests these are the most shared types of content.

Timing is everything. Test different times of day to find out when your followers are most active.

Monitor and respond to comments. Mostly to keep the conversation flowing, but partly to make sure nobody is being abusive to other commenters.

Post directly to Facebook rather than using a social media management platform like Hootsuite. Facebook’s algorithms favour content published this way.

Twitter                                                                                

Twitter is used by millions of businesses and individuals as a way to monitor conversations about their brand, interact with customers, manage customer service issues, promote offers and more.

Your twitter username is important as it makes up part of your Twitter profile url (the address you’ll put on all your marketing material to direct them to follow you on Twitter).

Try to keep the username short, simple and memorable.

Shorten links with bit.ly  but check they work.

Tweet daily. If you’re not consistently posting content your followers will lose interest.

Republish old content. There’s no reason not to shout about good things you’ve done in the past.  

Use hashtags to get your posts noticed. But whatever #you #do don’t stuff #your #tweets with them. It’s annoying.

Schedule tweets for evenings and weekends so you don’t miss out on traffic.

You can gain relevant fans if you follow other people in your industry.

Share other people’s content. Just keep it relevant and interesting.

When sharing an article, include an interesting quote or stat from the piece rather than just tweeting the title.

Include imagery in your tweets where possible. People are much more likely to share this kind of content.

Don’t ignore people who give you positive feedback. Take the time to reply as soon as you can.

Equally, don’t ignore the negative feedback. But never reply in an argumentative or defensive way. Keep it polite and professional.

Share ‘personal’ updates about the business. It makes you seem more human and people respond to that. 

Linked In                                                                             

Linked in is the hub for professionals and businesses to connect, market your brand, expertise and skills to the world.  It’s a great tool to help build your business and as an individual establish a professional profile.

A Linked In company page is a place for companies to provide more information about themselves, their products and services, job opportunities and to share expert insights.

Research by Linked In has revealed that you only need 100 to 200 followers of a company page to start making an impact and drive engagement.

Be active in relevant groups. Become part of the community by asking questions and replying to questions from others.

Use groups to promote content. But make sure it’s actually helpful to the group’s members and not just sales spam.

If you write a ‘blog’ post some of your best content in the LinkedIn publishing platform. If people read and enjoy your content they are likely to follow you. The LinkedIn blog is also a great place to find influencers in your industry.

Interact with influencers by commenting on and sharing their updates or posts.

Tag connections in posts if it is related to them or you think they are likely to share it with their followers.

Optimise your LinkedIn company page for search by including three or four of your main target keywords in the main description section.

Instagram                                                                              

Similar to Facebook or Twitter, everyone who creates an Instagram account has a profile and a news feed.

When you post a photo or video on Instagram, it will be displayed on your profile. Other users who follow you will see your posts in their own feed. Likewise, you'll see posts from other users whom you choose to follow.

It's like a simplified version of Facebook, with an emphasis on mobile use and visual sharing. Just like other social networks, you can interact with other users on Instagram by following them, being followed by them, commenting, liking, tagging and private messaging. You can even save the photos you see on Instagram.

Instagram is available for free on iOS devices, like the iPhone and iPad, as well as Android devices, like phones and tablets from Google, Samsung, etc.

It can also be accessed on the web from a computer, but users can only upload and share photos or videos from their devices.