The Ultimate Guide To

WHAT TO POST ON

CONTENT

1. Types of content forsharing and publishing

A. Adjacent content

B. Extracurricular activities

C. Useful information (Tips & Tricks)

D. Reposts & replies

E. Work opportunities

F. Funny, cute or entertaining content

G. Giveaways or interactive contests

2. When and how toshare and publish online

A. Frequency of posts

B. Interaction and statistical analysis

C. Brand creation

3. How to be likeable,clickable, and trustworthy.

A. Constant virtual presence

B. Expressing human behaviour

C. Adding value by being competitive

D. Being inclusive

E. Practising ethical etiquette

4. How to managea crisis

A. Precaution

B. Damage control

C. Recovery

D. Improvement

5. Helpful toolsand gadgets

A. Scheduling

B. Images

C. Email

D. Collaboration

E. Analytics

Social media has revolutionised the way we interact with each other. We’re connected ‘platonically’ 24/7. The fact that companies and entrepreneurs are using these virtual platforms to promote their business shouldn’t come as a surprise because there’s now more than 2 billion active people on social media. Virtually all companies are online, even those who, in theory, don’t need an online presence. So, for a newly launched business, having a social media presence is no longer optional, it’s expected. The simple fact is that your customers are online and if you’re not around to answer their queries then your competitors will be only too happy to oblige.

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest, are all built slightly differently but all serve the same purpose: interaction. The word ‘interaction’ is key for both individuals and companies. Even though this sounds simple a lot of business struggle to find the best ways to interact with clients both old and new in the most efficient way possible. The purpose of this ultimate guide is to try shed some light on some of the most important concepts in social media marketing.

The rules of traditional marketing have been changed by the presence of social media. A multi-purpose platform that allows virtual social interaction of any kind. A company or an entrepreneur has to understand and adapt to the game in order to succeed. More so in this day and age where competition is fierce and markets are saturated.

The promotional behaviour of a business shouldn’t be robotic or corporate. It has to develop humanistic traits in order to fully capitalise on social media. This is because users are humans, regular people that act and judge like humans (strangely enough). This makes marketing trickier but not necessarily less effective.

In this section we’ll briefly look at themain types of content:

This type of content refers to the information indirectly related to the products or services that you offer. This helps to create a community with shared interests. By updating them on the latest trends that aren’t necessarily your own, you’ll attract people that share the same hobby/interest and want to be involved in the culture of your business. Align yourself with the emerging trends and make your audience the centre of it.

A. Adjacent content

Volunteering in the community is always beneficial both for the workforce and the local community itself. What’s more it’s brilliant for marketing too. But it’s not only charity work you can shout about. If your business has organised a cracking party, don’t be shy about posting it online. It’s important to show people what the culture is like within your business. After all, people work with people not faceless corporate entities.

Posting helpful information is literally the best thing you can do to rapidly increase the size & loyalty of your audience. Your followers will get fantastic information that will genuinely help them and you’ll acquire an image for being the ‘go to’ expert in your industry. We cannot overstate this point enough.

You don’t have to be original all the time. Sometimes, you can bounce off the ideas of others. Repost content; reply to people in the comment sections of blogs. As in the outside world, having direct conversations with people builds relationships and will inevitably lead to the strengthening of your community. This eases the burden of constantly trying to re-invent the wheel and it can create more followers because of your interactivity.

Posting job opportunities from either your own business or that of contacts that you are aware of can only benefit you. Firstly, you might find someone very talented that can benefit your business, and secondly, you’ll strengthen the bond between you and your followers, making them feel like they matter and that you seek their best interest.

B. Extracurricular activities

C. Useful information (Tips & Tricks)

D. Reposts and replies

E. Work opportunities

As stated before, your business shouldn’t act like a cold corporate machine. People like to have fun, so feel free to let your sense of humour come out to play on social media. Posting things that are witty, interesting or even cute can make you seem more human and approachable. In moderation of course and if appropriate. If you’re an undertaker, hold off the coffin jokes.

Another word of warning; make sure that the content you post or share is socially acceptable. If you post something offensive, it might backfire on you and have severe consequences for the business. If you aren’t sure, test it among your friends and colleagues first to see what they think.

You should consider organising a giveaway, a contest or developing a game to stimulate your community. Select one of your services or products as a prize. I don’t want to “give my services away” you might think, but the advantages outweigh the cost by a country mile. The image you’ll acquire is invaluable and your products will be publicised inside the winner’s family and friends. Not to mention that the winners are more than likely to become loyal clients afterwards.

Games are also used as a marketing tool by many companies. People like the idea of relaxing while playing a well-developed game, even for nothing in exchange. Other firms offer prizes and such that further stimulate the virality of the game.

F. It’s all about the funny

G. Giveaways, interactive contests & games

LOL

?

The old “if we had a pound for each time someone asked us this”. Everyone on social media is looking for an exact formula for post frequency, but we are afraid to say there isn’t one. You’ll have to go ‘by ear’ with this one.

The frequency largely depends on your audience and on the information you provide. You also have to take into consideration the platform you’re posting in and the time zone for your target audience. The statistical information is out there, so you’ll need to schedule your posts when your audience is most active online.

For example, on Facebook, one study found that the engagement rate is 18% higher on Thursdays and Fridays. Another one found that the engagement is 32% higher on weekends, especially on Sunday.

Twitter follows the same principle, but because of the more immediate and dynamic movement of the posts compared to Facebook, the engagement ranges are considered day by day, and when people are more inclined to have they Smartphones in their hands. Obviously, not while they’re sleeping, but an astonishing study found that Twitter users are 119% more likely to use the platform during school or work hours. Bad news for parents and employers, but good news for businesses.

Generally, frequency and timing should be studied and adjusted for your individual type of business. If you’re a news media outlet than multiple posts a day are necessary, but if you’re a clothing retailer, multiple posts a day could irritate your followers.

Always maintain the mentality of VALUE. Never post for the sake of posting and meeting a quota. Your audience will lose interest if you don’t provide value. You have to work for their attention and it should be them who search for your posts, not the other way around.

A. Frequency of posts

As stated before, interaction with the community is vital, especially in the startup phase of a business. The work volume of engagement and interactivity will slightly diminish with growth, but in the beginning, the more the better. Leave no question unanswered and no stone unturned. Stay active to stay alive and eventually grow.

As you expand as a business, you have to work smarter not harder to distance yourself from the competition. Here’s where solid mathematical-driven stats come into play. Search queries, social conversations, social surveys, specialist websites and professionals.

Whilst paying for help is one option, you can also do a lot of the work yourself, as follows:

Organise online surveys in exchange for services and/or products. They’ll provide extensive information and will benefit both the company and the client.

Create a product review section.

Release beta services for those who want an early access.

Monitor conversations across the web using special tools and apps. (PS. some of them are at the end of this guide)

B. Interaction andstatistical analysis

The creation of a brand never ends; it’s a continuous process to refine the perfect brand. To get heard in a noisy world, a brand must have its own unique style. That uniqueness depends largely on you and the people within the business but here are some guidelines to help you along the way:

Simplicity and user friendliness.Your website needs to allow easy browsing. Keep in mind that not everybody is PC proficient so you’ll have to design it accordingly. Try to follow the KISS acronym (Keep It Simple Stupid), don’t confuse the reader with mountains of text or too many buttons for features that nobody’s interested in. User test and constantly improve.

Trademark Trademarking refers to the elements that are original to your business and run like a theme through all your activity. This helps to establish an online identity. This concept includes everything from your logo, fonts, colours, brand description, watermarks, tone, voice, manner and other topographical and structural elements.

Integrate Social media is amazing but it’s only one string to your bow. If it stands alone then it won’t succeed. It needs careful integration with the rest of your marketing efforts. Make sure that your business looks the same across all platforms. Use similar graphics, images, phrases, slogans to ensure that the theme of your brand runs through your entire marketing.

Omnipresence

Nobody should have to search too hard to find information about you. To avoid such a problem, make sure you have cross-platform availability. Ensure a stable link between your websites, blogs, social media accounts and so on. You’ll also have to promote unique posts for every platform as to keep people subscribed to multiple accounts at the same time. For example, why would they follow you on Twitter if they are already following on FB? Keep this in mind.

Be humanThis has been stated before, but studies have proven its importance, especially when your clients are people and not corporations. A business must show that human touch in everything that is does. A professional attitude must be maintained, even when posting a compilation of dancing cats (everyone loves dancing cats, right?)

C. Brand creation

Well, in a nutshell, doing these things online is not that different from doing them in the real world. So let’s have a look at a few practical things you can do:

Building a brand means being active. You need to establish trust between your business and your audience on social media. And the first requisite to establishing any kind of relationship is to get yourself out there. If you’re not there you can’t build relationships. That said, if you can’t be there yourself then sub contract this work to someone who can. But make sure you communicate clearly your business’ unique personality to whoever does this work.

Nobody can relate to a dull or robotic personality. While maintaining professionalism and good manners, you have to relate on a human level with your potential clients. Including ‘behind the scenes’ posts and images about your business works really well here.

You can be as awesome as you like on social media but if your products or services are rubbish, chances are you won’t do very well. Consider a business like a balance scale; the more your product is exclusive the less you’ll have to worry about marketing, the more common your product is, the more you’ll have to focus on marketing. The best advice is to work on both of them equally. Even if your product is common, strive to perfect it as to stand out and acquire loyal customers.

A. Constant virtual presence

B. Expressing human behaviour

C. Adding value by being competitive

In other words – don’t be a spammer. Be careful with the use of hashtags. Many a large business have got into deep water following the inappropriate use of a hashtag. Also, try not to be overly pushy, especially at first, as this is a major turn off on social media. Try to become the honey so that the bees come to you.

E. Practising ethical etiquette

Being inclusive means not treating a select few so specially that newcomers will feel unwelcomed. Try to appeal to every section of the population both socially and economically. Even if your products or services are by nature expensive or exclusive, try to create merchandise suited for other, if not all, groups of the population.

D. Being inclusive

Hopefully, you’ll never have to deal with a major crisis as a business, but should the worst happen it’s always good to be prepared.

The first important element in crisis management is prevention. As they say, “prevention is better than the cure”. The business needs to look at each stage of its process to understand where the risks lie and what it can do to minimise them.

In other words, who’s going to do what if something goes wrong. It’s important to know, not only who is going to do what but also when and how. Facing problems head on is much better than burying your head in the sand. In fact, using social media to resolve problems can turn negatives into positives by demonstrating clearly how your business deals with issues that arise.

The old, ‘how do we get things back on track’? This would include steps that the business can take to show how they have effectively dealt with the negative situation. Whilst this may sometimes involve monetary compensation or giving something away, often just acknowledging the situation and saying “sorry” can go a long way to making amends.

The final step of the process is the improvement of the company’s behaviour so that the same old mistakes don’t keep happening. Review what went well & also the areas for improvement so that the business can get it right next time. No business is perfect, but making a genuine attempt to put things right online can do wonders for your business’ reputation.

A: Prevention

B: Damage control

C: Recovery

D: Improvement

To succeed in any trade, you’ll need the right tools. And like they say, ‘good tools are half of the work’. Below you’ll find some invaluable tools that we use on a daily basis that can also really help you too.

Most business owners will ‘do’ social media when they get a free hour at the end of the week. They’ll spew out dozens of posts all in one go and clog up everyone’s feeds. This is a sure-fire way of being unfollowed. Invest in a scheduling tool that will space your posts out evenly over the course of the week or the month. Here’s a few options that we have used:

https://eclincher.com/http://sproutsocial.com/https://buffer.com/

Working together and knowing what each person is doing within a business is vital. That’s why tools that help with collaboration are brilliant to organise and share information across the organisation. We use these tools both with our business and to collaborate with clients.

https://trello.com https://slack.com/https://todoist.com

You need to know your onions. If you don’t have analytics in place how do you know what effect the work you’re doing on social media and other online marketing is having? You need answers to questions such as, how many visitors am I getting to my website? Where do they come from? What keywords do they use? What are they doing when they get there? To answer these questions, you need analytics. Here are the ones you need:

https://moz.com/products https://analytics.google.com http://www.cyfe.com/

A: Scheduling

D: Collaboration E: Analytics

Visual content is more than 40 times more likely to get shared on social media that other types of content. That’s why it’s so important to have fantastic images. Here’s a few tools that we use:

https://www.canva.com/https://spark.adobe.com/https://pixabay.com/

Email marketing still stands alone as the best ‘bang for your buck’ in terms of return on investment. If you haven’t got an email list then start building one by getting subscribers from your website. Create a free guide or whitepaper (just like this one) & make good use of tools such as the ones listed below which can help automate the process:

http://myemma.com/https://mailchimp.com/https://sumome.com/

B: Images C: Email