One of the most significant components of a year-end review is the reevaluation of your social media reputation. Social media has now become a direct pathway for many companies to interact with consumers and depending on how it’s utilized, it can end up being a gift and a curse for your bottom line. Here is a list of five things that every company needs to do if they want a positive return on their social media presence.
1. Establish continuity across all channels.
Someone shouldn’t see your Facebook page, then visit your Twitter feed and wonder if the same department is sending out these messages. Now, this isn’t to say you should copy and paste content on all of your social sites but content continuity is key on all social channels. If the campaign for this month is about yearly audits, your Linkedin page could have an article from a business journal while your Facebook page shares a video from another source and your Instagram page displays an infographic. Learn that each site has a unique audience and post accordingly..
2. Develop a posting strategy and stick to it.
We all start with good intentions when it comes to posting on social media, but life happens and those five posts a day turn into three a week and eventually dwindle to a mindset of getting to it when I can — and that happens even faster when you have multiple channels. To avoid this, create a social media calendar that outlines your upcoming post and coordinates it with a campaign calendar. Scheduling post through an app like Hootsuite is helpful because you can schedule content over multiple channels which allows the submission to your Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts to occur at once.
3. Echo the tone of your company.
Pay attention to how your company communicates in other office correspondence and mimic it in your social media writing. If the corporate voice is more professional, it may not be wise to post photo memes on Instagram with pop culture verbiage that many of your co-workers wouldn’t understand. Conversely, if the company uses fun and light-hearted language to discuss company matters, you might want to stay away from Facebook posts that resemble a medical journal.
4. Proofread your post.
Having proper grammar and active links won’t improve your social clout but if you continuously misspell words or have broken links, your posts will lose credibility. It is much easier to proofread a post and avoid the embarrassment of having to justify the mishap or delete it all together; the social media grammar police are not forgiving when it comes to spelling or context errors. Resources like grammarly.com help you overcome minor mistakes which can turn an informative blog post into a comment-section debate over the proper usage of “their, they’re, or there” and cause your audience to miss the intent of what you wrote.
5. Interact with your audience.
Content is created to inform, but every successful business takes time to interact with its audience. Whether it’s a live-stream question and answer session or merely acknowledging when consumers comment on any of your social channel pages, these interactions break down communication barriers that customers feel valued and allow casual observers to become supporters of your cause or product. In some cases, companies also use social media to resolve customer service issues. You might not want to have a full-out dialog on Twitter about a bad experience for a customer, but it is an excellent way to obtain their contact information to resolve the issue discreetly.
Osky Blue can help you leverage these tools and incorporate a cohesive social media strategy into your overall marketing plan. Our social media experts provide a variety of services, Contact us today.