3 Best Practices for your Social Media Presence
A lot of people have a personal account on at least one social media platform, but managing a social account for your business requires some different skills and planning. That’s why it’s so important to adhere to some best practices for every professional account you manage. Whether you are part of a multi-national corporation or a locally-owned shop that just opened its doors, read on to learn three ways you can put your social presence to work for your business.
Make some goals
Many businesses create a social media account in order to be more easily searched or discovered by potential clients. However, while it is a good idea to increase your company’s visibility, you also need to post with a purpose. Before you even choose a logo or add your company’s website to your Facebook page, you need to decide which goals you will set for your social media platforms. For instance, are you hoping to reach a specific audience? A new audience? Do you want people to engage with your posts and share them to their own pages and profiles? If you didn’t have a social media account anymore, would anyone even notice? Know what you want to accomplish before you begin will help you take the right steps.
Once you have goals, it’s equally important to measure your progress toward them on a regular basis. You can utilize the tools that individual social platforms provide to start; as your company’s social media presence grows, you may want to use a paid service that provides you with the opportunity to dive deeper into discovering who reads your posts, how many people share them, and which posts are the most popular. This information will allow you to tweak your goals to best suit your company’s needs.
Set aside some hours
It’s a common practice for many businesses to view social media management as a side gig, rather than its own industry. While social media can certainly fall under the marketing umbrella, it still requires some dedicated hours and attention to maintain each platform successfully. Depending on the size of your company, social media management may need to be its own role, or you may be able to divvy up the responsibilities between multiple team members. The main goal for this is to designate a certain number of hours each week to maintain and engage with your social platforms.
We would all love it if our work week wrapped up precisely at 5:00 PM every Friday. But that isn’t always the case, and this is especially true for social media. You don’t need to have someone monitoring your social accounts 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but it is worth the time to have someone check in for a few minutes over the weekend in case any unexpected comments or messages pop up. Getting ahead of an inciting comment on your latest post will go a long way in helping you maintain your social media presence during the week.
Use a consistent voice
We already talked about how having a team of people to manage your social media accounts can be useful in making sure your social presence is adequately monitored and maintained. And having multiple people is also useful in the event that the person who is typically in charge of posting is unavailable. But if you choose to go this route, it’s important that you maintain consistency in the tone of your posts and photos. While you may use a lot of emojis on your personal accounts, that might not be the image your business wants to convey. Or if you have one person posting while another replies to comments, you might find that the inconsistency in tone leads to confusion and miscommunication. That’s why it’s important to decide what type of voice your social platforms will have.
You can’t predict everything – a team member who is new to the social staff may find themselves replying for the first time to a comment with little preparation. But you can sit down with your social team and define the types of responses and tone you want to use when typing anything on your social accounts. Giving everyone the chance to start out on the same page will allow you to create a more unified tone across the board.
Your business needs to be on social media, and it’s up to you to make it happen. You get out of it what you put into it, so make a plan and commit to growing your social media presence. Invest your time and resources wisely into social media and you may just watch your business achieve an even higher level of success.