Social media is a vital part of delivering your message well and wide - getting the right messages to a broad range of people who are, or could be, your customers. It’s so obvious that it’s almost a waste of an opening sentence to say so.
And social media strategy is vital - knowing what platforms to use, and how to make sure they are effective, matched to your audience and align with your messages and services. That’s the point where we normally get involved - evaluating what you’re already doing, and making sure you have a strategy, and the capacity and capability to deliver it. But when all that’s done and you’re established on the right platforms, and even toying with ones you’d not thought of before, there’s one prosaic question we keep getting asked. Now you’ve got all these platforms…. What to post on them?
It’s not easy, and life may not be as lively and as instagrammable, tweetable, or tik-tokable as you’d like. But you’ve got these presences, so what to say?
Make a calendar
Planning, planning, planning. If you get an editorial calendar together - marking up each day what you’ll post and on what platform (and not just posting exactly the same on each), then you can relax a little knowing what’s coming next, share it with others to make sure it makes sense (and get it signed off) and ease that sense of panic and ‘now what?’ It can just be a simple excel sheet or Google doc, and just refreshed each week. You’ll feel the tension ease, we promise.
Bank some content
Even then, there’ll be days you struggle to fill, so get some ‘fillers’ ready. Get some pictures of the team ready so you can introduce them to the public on days when … ahem… you have nothing better. Get pictures of the company dog (or cat), the daily meeting (or Zoom), just some ‘stock’ content for those days when inspiration fades.
Don’t worry about re-posting
If you’ve had posts which have done well or which, conversely, you thought should have done better (maybe they got swamped or you posted at the wrong time of day), don’t be afraid of re-posting - either in their entirety, or the same message, but different wording, picture, or tagged to a different team member or client. The speed of social media means that people will miss a lot of what you do. Don’t be afraid of giving them a second chance to see…
Get quote cards ready
If you’re blogging or making podcasts of video, then make sure you’re leveraging them on your social media channels as best you can. Cut key quotes, moments, or images from your web and video content, and create individual standalone pieces of social media content from them. And then link to the original to drive that traffic back.
Make sure you support a new service or product
It sounds obvious, but make sure social media is an integral part of any announcements for new services or products, or significant appointments. And that means ‘core’, not just an afterthought. For many companies, social media is THE way to make announcements and the age of the press release is dead. For some announcements, there may be legal requirements (to tell the Stock Exchange for example) or good practice to tell trade journalists, but, by and large, the age of emailing a pdf of an announcement has gone under the wheels of the social media juggernaut.
Explore the edges of what you do
Sometimes there are interesting things that surround what you do. If you do, for example, experiential services (ELT courses in the UK or tourism), then (at some point in the future) you can highlight the things that are around the core - the sites people might visit, the people who run the accommodation you partner with, the small, local food festival. Broaden out the sense of what you deliver and give your potential clients that extra inspiration.
Comment on relevant news
There’s always lots of news, and lots of opinion to surround it, so there’s no need to add to that pile, but wise commentary on relevant events is good. It might be to support lobbying efforts for funds for your industry, or support a new initiative. It’s ok to have opinions, but steer clear of party politics. That never works.
Curate generously
‘Curating’ content on your social media is just linking to other people’s stuff, but there’s real value in pushing your followers to the good stuff. And be generous when you do - like, retweet, share or comment in good spirit and link and tag others, and you’ll find that people do the same for you, pushing users your way.
Show off case studies
Where possible, and with client confidentiality foremost, you should be posting case studies on your website and/or social media. Talk about what problem you solved and with what product/service you did it. There’s some good examples here (and more to come).
Schedule
If a big project looms on the horizon, or your social media guru has the temerity to go on holiday, and you know there won’t be time to post, schedule posts in so you stay active even when you’re not around. Facebook has a free built in tool to help setup posts in advance, while Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn posts can be scheduled with tools like Hootsuite, Later and Sprout.
Given all that, there’s even less reason to be sluggish on social, but if you’re still not sure about the best way to go about it, then get in touch.
And while you’re at it, follow Disquiet Dog on our platforms of choice: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
