Social Media: The Rules of Engagement
Social media is exactly how it sounds, it’s social. If you’re not posting content consistently, engaging your followers, and allocating time for your accounts, you’re missing out on its full potential. Follow these 7 rules that we follow here at DCA Virtual Business Support to build a healthy foundation for your business and brand to grow on social media.
Develop a Plan
So! You’ve made the leap into social media and you’re asking yourself ‘What now?’ It’s important to develop a plan based on what your goals are. You need more than just a presence on social media. What tone do you want to project? What content do you want to share? What problems do my products or services solve? These are important questions to answer before you delve into creating your first post as they are your brand guidelines.
If you need some help creating those guidelines, peek at our post, Preparing your Content Marketing Strategy for 2022, for some helpful tips, or reach out to us here at DCA for a Creative Assistant to get the ball rolling.
Know your Audience
Your audience could cover more than one demographic or age group. Knowing your target audience will help you choose what social media platforms you will need to use. Using all of them might be a waste of time if your audience isn’t on them.
If your audience is in an older demographic, they’ve increased their Facebook use over the last 6 years and are embracing the digital life. But, if your audience is younger, you’ll want to use Twitter. 42% of Twitter users are between 18 and 29 years, and 27% are 30 to 49.
Don’t forget Instagram, another popular platform for younger demographics. More than half are 34 or younger! TikTok is great for content creators and creating memes or sharing funny clips. If you aren’t careful on that platform, you’ll come across as out of touch and get blocked by users for being just another advertisement. Essentially, know your audience and learn what they are interested in.
Content of Value
Take a look at your competitor’s social media and see how their audience is engaging with their content. You want your social media content to be valuable and focused on what your audience’s interests are. Your audience has their own problems, goals, and lives so you want each post to be relatable to them. What are you offering that will solve a problem or help with their lives? You are looking to be informational or entertaining, have the answer they need or interest they like, and to be an authority on the subject.
You may remember a few years back when Arby’s changed up their social media? They realized that audiences have an aversion to advertisements, they changed how they were presenting what they were selling. They didn’t make it primary, they made it secondary! And it worked.
Quality not Quantity
The fastest way to lose subscribers is to burst post, which is too many updates at a time, or post too often in one day. Followers don’t like their feeds being flooded with posts from one company or brand. Utilizing platforms such as Buffer or Hootsuite will help you spread out your posts and set them up ahead of time. It’s important to remember that quality is more important than quantity.
Don’t have all your posts be about you! For quality posts, try to keep them at 80/20. 80% to entertain and engage the audience, and 20% to sell to them. Also, try to limit your hashtags, not much will make you seem more desperate for likes than overuse of hashtags.
Don’t neglect the analytics provided with your social media accounts. They help you track what and how your audience is engaging your content so you can update your strategy accordingly. If you want to know more about analytics, you can read another of our posts, Using Analytics to Learn about your Customers.
Speak to the Individual
When you are writing your social media posts, don’t act like you are speaking to a crowd of 1,000 or more. Treat it like you are having a one-on-one discussion with them. People like to be treated like individuals, not a group.
Remember to use the first person plurals ‘we’ or ‘us’ when you are talking about your company and brand. A sense of humor is good here, just look at Wendy’s and how they frequently go viral for roasting other brands. Don’t be afraid to be different.
Engage your Audience
Many companies out there just post content and walk away without engaging their audience! Or they post so infrequently that they lose followers. It’s very important to interact with comments on your post, and we don’t mean sending a direct message. Social Media is social! You need to be consistent when publishing content and engage in conversation with your followers. Building a relationship will help engage them and in doing so, they’ll be more likely to share the post and increase entry points.
Share others Content
Back to quality posts and not only talking about your brand, it’s important to share others’ content as well. Social media is just that, it’s social and inclusive, you need to care about others. You want to contribute to the online community, whether that is sharing an event or an informational blog post.
Social media is not all about conversions, it’s about the community that drives it. If the community doesn’t like what you are selling, or how you are selling it, your business will not grow on social media.
After reading over these rules, you might be overwhelmed by the amount of time it would take to create each post, curate it to your audience, and engage in conversation. You have a business to run, forget about the time it takes to run social media accounts.
But, that’s why we’re here! DCA can do all that heavy lifting with our Creative Assistants. We can create your content paired with stimulating and engaging images, craft it carefully for each platform, and post it all for you. Just focus on taking care of your business, and we’ll take it from here.