Social Media Best Practices You Should

Incorporate Into Your Campaign

Figure 1(From lyfemarketing.com)

If you’ve tried your hand at managing various social media accounts for your

business, then you know that your workload can add up quickly! And it would be a

little relief if you had some advice on social media best practices to help you out.

Between posting content, running ads, and responding to messages in real-time

(not just on one platform but on 3 or 4!), managing social media can become a full-

time job.

The two biggest problems that most businesses face are that they either don’t have

enough time to manage their social media. Or if they do, they don’t have the

knowledge or experience to manage it well and use social media best practices.

Social media management can sometimes appear easy to take on at first due to the

easy user experience on any given platform. But handling social media for

a businesss is a lot different and more intricate than it is for a personal account.

All of the sudden, followers and engagement become more than a vanity metric:

they’re opportunities for leads and sales.

Engagement is now crucial for you to capitalize on for the growth of your

company. Posting everyday is no longer just a fun hobby but a necessity to keep

your followers engaged and invested in your brand.

Plus, many users who have never used social media for business probably don’t

know this, but most all social media platforms have a backend user experience

specifically for businesses.

These platforms such as Facebook Ads Manager, Twitter Analytics & Ads,

Instagram Business profiles and others can take a while to get really experienced

at. But they are essential to growing your business social media accounts!

So how do you implement social media best practices with all of your accounts?

Which tools and strategies are a waste of time, and which are truly effective?

We’re going to answer this question and more. Because today we’re covering the 8

social media best practices you should incorporate into your campaigns.

1. Conversion Ads

If you have any sort of checkout process set up on your site, or if you capture leads

of any kind on your site, you’ll want to invest in conversion ads.

We talk more about conversion ads in depth in this blog. But we’ll cover the basics

here too because it’s one of the absolute top social media best practices!

Many advertisers make the mistake of running Website Traffic Ads. You may be

wondering how it’s a “mistake” if you’re directing users to your website, but you

have to take Facebook’s algorithm into account.

If you run a Website Traffic Campaign, then Facebook is going to show the ad to

users within your target audience who are likely to click, and that’s it – not

actually convert.

Do 3,000 link clicks to your site matter if none of them convert? No, of course not.

Even if you change the optimization from link clicks to landing page views (which

is supposed to show the ad to people who are likely to click and wait for the page

to load), you’re still not optimizing for conversions.

A conversion ad is presented to people within your target audience who are likely

to click and convert! And at the end of the day, that’s what we value the most

right?

Optimizing for conversions within your ad campaign is definitely one of our

recommended social media best practices you want to follow for success.

Like we mentioned previously, a conversion ad campaign is best when you want to

track sales or lead form completions on your site. This can include anything from

avast ecommerce store to a simple contact form.

You’ll need to install a conversion tracking pixel in order to run conversion ads.

And that can take a little extra setup, but it’s well worth it!

Outside of laser-targeting people who are already likely to convert, the second

major benefit to a conversion campaign is its trackability. You can track everything

from video views to engagement to clicks and finally sales. And you can create

filtered, funneled audiences based off of this information.

Having this data allows you to send specific ads to specific audiences and continue

moving them down the sales funnel until they’re a closed customer.

Unlike older, more traditional forms of advertising such as billboards or even TV

commercials, a social media conversion campaign gives you the ability to follow

your customer’s journey and see if your marketing efforts directly paid off or not!

2. Posting Daily

This is one of the biggest social media best practices: post content daily.

Social media is a 24/7 arena, and users are always hungry for new content! If

you’re not posting new content on all of your social media platforms every day,

then you risk the chance of losing both engagement and followers.

Not only does it stunt your potential for engagement from your current audience,

but you’ll probably see fewer new followers come in as a result as well.

In the few brief seconds that someone makes a decision to follow your social

media account or not, one of the first things they’re going to look at is how active

the account is.

If the last time you posted was 3 days ago (let alone 2 weeks ago or more), you’re

losing a good percentage of potential followers. So don’t miss out on a single

opportunity! Post daily.

Another way to follow social media best practices and ensure your accounts look

active is with any real-time updates. This will look different across different social

media platforms, but this could include publishing Instagram Stories, live-

tweeting, or live-streaming on Facebook, for example.

As you publish daily, be sure to keep up with real-time events and holidays also to

reinforce your relevancy and up-to-date branding as a business!

In addition to the obvious, bigger holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourth of

July etc., be sure to pay attention to any smaller holidays that are relevant to your

business.

For instance, if you run a dog-walking business, then you’ll want to capitalize on

National Dog Day (which is August 26, for those wondering). This drive-in theater

chose to capitalize on the holiday and target their dog loving customers.

Not only will this help gain traction with your specific audience, but it will make

your account appear current and active which is a must!

3. Boosting Posts

Now that we’ve discussed how important it is to post daily, let’s make sure your

audience is seeing those posts!

Did you know less than 10% of your Facebook followers see your posts

organically in their News Feed? The same general rule applies to Instagram and

Twitter as well, but Facebook in particular is a very “pay-to-play” platform.

It’s hard to follow social media best practices if your audience isn’t even seeing

your content.

So how do you ensure that your audience sees your fantastic daily posts? Boost

them! (Or promote them as it’s called on Twitter).

Figure 2( Sample facebook ad manager)

Boosting a post is the equivalent to sponsoring it; you’re putting ad dollars behind

it to give it more reach. Within the ad platform, you can select the audience you

want to serve the post to. This can either strictly consist of your Facebook

following, new people who haven’t liked your page yet, or both!

Either way, boosted posts optimize for post engagement, giving you the most bang

for your buck in terms of reach, comments, likes, and shares on your daily content.

4. Using the right creatives

Using the right creative is essential when looking at social media best practices.

Did you know that people respond best to visuals because they remember 80% of

what they see?

Figure 3 (From lyfemarketing.com)

So be sure your brand is making a good impression with your visuals! It’s super

important to make sure all of your visuals are fresh, high-resolution, bright, “non-

stock-image-y” looking photos.

This is especially important on Instagram given its visual nature and grid profile

look.

Outside of the look of the visuals, you want to make sure they’re sized properly!

Different platforms, types of posts and paid posts all have different size

requirements. Most themes, like Wordpress theme are responsive themes. They

automatically resize to fit into mobile and other forms of PCs.

For instance, an Instagram post could be 800×800, whereas a LinkedIn post needs

be 1200×627. It’s super important to pay attention to the size because poor sizing

could lead to a high-resolution photo appearing pixelated.

Not to mention, any sort of errors that appear in your social media (whether it be

the wrong photo sizing or a grammar error) can lead to a lack of trust in your brand

from your followers. And a lack of trust can eventually make you lose out on

potential sales- and we don’t want that!

In addition to your posts and organic content, you’ll want to be specific with your

ad creatives as well. Facebook and Instagram both have the 20% text rule for any

ad creatives (including boosted posts).

This means there can be no more than 20% text on the ad image or video

thumbnail, otherwise, the ad will not run!

Since boosted posts are considered advertisements, you’ll want to try and think

about your content in advance; if you plan on boosting a post, make sure the image

with that post isn’t covered in text.

The last thing to remember when it comes to using strong creatives is to use

videos- especially with ads! Videos outperform static images 9 times out of 10 on

social media, and they’re great at getting a point across in a matter of seconds. Be

sure your videos tell the same message with and without sound though. Because

most people watch videos on mobile and often have the sound turned off.

5. Growing Followers (Organically and Paid)

It doesn’t matter how much you invest in your content and ads if nobody is seeing

them! Growing your followers is crucial to growing your brand awareness and

potential customer base.

So how do you do it? Well, there’s two ways: organically and with paid ads.

As we mentioned earlier, Facebook is a pay-to-play platform. Unless you’re a

famously well-known brand, like Nike for example, it’s nearly impossible to

dramatically grow your Facebook followers without the use of ads.

Facebook has the Page Like ad campaign that gives your target audience the

chance to like your business page from that ad. At that point, they will see a

percentage of your posts moving forward.

That is just about the only way to significantly grow your following on Facebook,

but thankfully this is not the case on other “organic” platforms as we call them!

On platforms like Twitter and Instagram, you can grow your followers without

having to necessarily pay for them.

LYFE Marketing performs mass following strategies to gain targeted followers for

our clients, and we also utilize the help of hashtags.

Hashtags are public searchable words or phrases (that do not include spaces or

punctuation), and when you use them in your posts, your post will then show up

for that hashtag. The more hashtags you use, the more routes people have to find

your post, and therefore your account!

Using hashtags increases follower interaction because you are able to reach more

people. Be careful though! There is a such thing as too many hashtags depending

on what your audience likes to see. Find that sweet spot.

6. Initiating Conversation With Intentional Engagement

This social media best practice sort of ties in with #5 as well, but we’ve given it its

own bullet point because we think it’s that important: initiate conversation with

your target audience.

By nature, social media is an intimate space. It gives you a direct peek into

people’s lives and behind the scenes of businesses- so don’t be afraid to be

personable in the way you communicate with users.

The same way that users can use hashtags to find your posts, you can use hashtags

to find theirs.

For instance, if you run a car wash, try searching hashtags around #carwash and

see what you find! Finding tweets from people that say “Man I sure could use a

#carwash!” gives you the perfect opportunity to reply to their tweet, and start

making a sale.

There are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of businesses in the world; make

yours stand out by “listening” to your customers online. Show your customer base

that you care and that your ultimate goal is to solve their needs.

Liking your customer base’s content, commenting @ them and overall engaging

with them increases their trust in your brand, boosts your brand awareness, and

brings you one step closer to increasing your revenue.

7. Monitor Daily

The more you begin to grow your followers and engagement, the more regularly

you’ll need to check your account. At LYFE, we monitor for our clients daily M-F!

Responding to comments and messages in real time is key to ensuring good

customer service and building trust in your brand.

Facebook even keeps track of your response time for you on the admin level of

business pages. Users can see this status as well.

Figure 4 (From Facebook)

You can even set up automated messages that trigger when your page receives a

message.

Even if it’s something as simple as, “Hello and thank you for messaging us! A

team member will get back to your shortly,” that allows your response rate to stay

immediate 100% of the time, and it gives the user instant reassurance that they will

be responded to.

In your monitoring, you’ll also want to make sure you respond not only to the

positive comments, but to the negative comments too. This is an integral part

of reputation management for your business.

Complaints can definitely appear in your social media comments or reviews, so

you want to make sure you handle them in a timely and professional manner so as

to keep your brand in good standing.

You’ll also want to check for spam or vulgar comments. Negative or spammy-

looking comments that have nothing to do with your business can and should be

deleted as soon as possible so as to keep your page clean and free of them.

Outside of your organic content and pages, the last thing you’ll want to monitor are

your ads.

Running social media ads does not mean setting them up and then just letting them

run. You should be checking them daily and optimizing them to ensure they’re

spending the budget properly and meeting your goals- just like what we at LYFE

do for our clients.

8. Retargeting

Retargeting may be the last point on this list of social media best practices, but it’s

by far one of the most important.

It’s extremely rare that customers make a purchase or form completion upon the

very first time of hearing about your company.

It’s important to have several touch points with the customer in order to warm

them up to your brand and turn them into a closed customer. In order to do this,

you’ll need to retarget them.

And the good news is you can retarget just about everything we’ve talked about so

far! Remember earlier when we said you can create specific audiences based on

engagement, video views and more? This is where that comes in handy.

For instance, you can create an audience of people who have engaged with your

ads, or watched a video, and exclude people who have already converted to make

sure you’re bringing in new customers.

But that’s not say that you can’t retarget existing customers as well- go for it!

Retargeting your existing customer base is an easy way to make repeat customers

out of them.

Now You’re Prepared

Those are the 8 social media best practices. Your social media campaign should

not rely on any one method, but should more so lean on a combination of methods

that work together in one cohesive digital marketing strategy. With the right

message finding the right audience, you’re bound to be successful on social media.

Need an experienced digital marketing team to handle your social media marketing

for you? Feel free to contact me for more enlightenment.

Edafe Ogribi

Digital Marketing Consultant.