Five easy ways to supercharge your business social media

Thursday, 20 May 2021

Social media is crucial to business in the digital age. The way you use your social media, the platforms you choose and the content you post all help customers to find information and interact with your brand, and allow you to promote and build community around your product and get feedback. And its reach is immense, and still growing: more than half of the world now uses social media with 316 million new users having come online within the last 12 months alone.1 A recent report by PwC found that 58 percent of people increased their social media use since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and 86 percent expect to maintain their current level of use2. With such potential power at your fingertips, it’s worth considering whether you are really getting the most out of your social media. We look at five easy ways to supercharge your posts and make your digital truly dynamic.  

 

Be social… 

Social means…social. To make your social media sing you need to respond and interact with your audience. It’s an obvious point perhaps, but it’s surprising how many small businesses miss this crucial step out of their strategy. Merely broadcasting — posting at customers with little or no interaction — is not likely to engage them or encourage them to try what you’re offering. Instead, write posts with energy and a CTA behind them, starting conversations or opening up a question to the floor — and respond to what your customers say, something that will not only keep the conversation going but also show that you are fully invested in your social media. And don’t forget, connecting extends to other pages, businesses and influencers; share their content, comment on their posts and create a relationship, and it’s likely they will also do the same, extending your reach in return.  

 

Supercharge tips:  

• When creating social campaigns include ways for your online fans to spread the message to their friends on your behalf and incentivise conversation. This could include anything from offering discount codes and exclusive content to competitions to engender sharing.   

 

Make it visual… 

On social media, a picture is worth a thousand words — indeed, visual content is 40 times more likely to get shared on social media; Facebook posts with images get 230 per cent more engagement than those without, and tweets with embedded images get 150 per cent more retweets. The human brain is wired to consume visuals more effectively than any other form of content, processing them 60,000 times faster than text, and is 65 per cent more like to remember information as well if it includes an image, especially a colour one. So get it right and the returns can be big – colourful images have been shown to increase people’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80 per cent and a study by Neilson showed that 38 per cent of brand recall, 23 per cent of brand awareness and 25 per cent of purchase intent result came from video impressions less than two seconds long.  

 

Supercharge tips:  

• Avoid generic stock pics in favour of user-generated images, behind-the-scenes shots and video footage and images related to your business that gives the audience a story they can connect with. Optimise photo images at 1200 × 630+ pixels for Facebook and Twitter to ensure the visuals really stand out in the media feed and keep videos to an appropriate and optimal length — according to the platform you’re on, that can be anything from 15 seconds (Instagram stories and Twitter), up to 10 minutes for LinkedIn and YouTube. 

 

 

Schedule posts…  

If your social posting is taking significant time out of your day you are likely to be operating in the social media Dark Ages. Get yourself up to speed with a social media scheduler app such as Buffer or Hootsuite and free yourself from the shackles of remembering to upload. By writing your posts in groups and then scheduling them to go out when you choose you not only free up time in the day to be productive but to interact with your followers online and build relationships. In addition, it allows you to optimise your social media sharing times too; sort posts by likes, impressions or engagement rates, then see when the top posts were published or if any times keep coming up, to give you a good idea of your best hours in the day to post. Scheduling posts is also a great way to ensure consistency in your social media strategy, something that builds trust and credibility, by allowing you the time and space to craft each post properly and fit it into a larger social media strategy.  

 

Supercharge tips: 

• Many of your posts will inevitably be wasted — research shows most Twitter users don’t even log on once a day, for example, so it’s easy even for your fans to miss things. Use strategic scheduling to push out popular evergreen content at regular intervals for the maximum views from the largest amount of people. 

 

Add value  

Going in with the hard sell rarely, if ever, works online. Social media users see through such tactics and turn away quickly to the next thing — a study by Microsoft shows that people now generally start to lose concentration after only eight seconds3.  So instead think of adding value and creating a proposition they want to engage with. Digital has turned sales from the transactional to the experiential for consumers, who now look to be educated, informed or entertained online, with sales a natural by-product of this relationship. Adding value in your social can include posting useful links and curating original content to engaging with your community through a Q&A session or live masterclass and offering exclusive access to content or giveaways. Importantly, use your social media to talk about what is important to the customer, rather than just what is important to you — and make sure you’re always ‘solving their biggest problems’. One of the top four reasons consumers unfollow brands on social media is irrelevant content (45 per cent).4 

 

Supercharge tips: 

• Authenticity and relatability are powerful connectors so add value with a warm and personable tone, a little humour from time to time and some behind-the-curtain content, from video to photos, — an effective way to allow people to see your journey and connect with you. 

 

Be analytical… 

It might not be the shiny, exciting part of social media, but monitoring your analytics is the savvy way to know what to post and when to post it for real impact. It’s no good creating beautiful content if it isn’t getting any traction — and the quickest way to supercharge your social is to land it well. There are plenty of tools that can tell you when your audience is online and how well posts or strategies are performing so you can course-correct if necessary — and with over 500 million tweets on Twitter, 95 million videos and photos uploaded on Instagram and 4.5 billion likes and reactions on Facebook every day, it is data with a potential punch. By using your social engagement to gather intelligence on the popularity and reach of posts you can begin to post smarter, not just more often, see where you are doing well and amplify that — and avoid wasting your time and posts in other areas.  

 

Supercharge tips: 

• Set targets around social media platforms — it’s not enough to just post regularly and hope for the best; you need to have something to measure your success against and those metrics will inform how you read and respond to data from sources such as Twitter Analytics and Facebook Insights.