Organically Managing Social Media
Social media came and took the world by storm.
One could argue that nowadays having a social media presence could be considered almost as important as having a website.
If you’re in the B2C space, you’d be absolutely insane (or a genius?) if you’re not running on at least some form of social media.
However, having an active presence on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, is equally as important for professional services and those in the B2B space.
We’ve seen your social media accounts, some of these need to be given a kiss of life, so we’ve compiled a list of 5 DIY social media management tips.
Managing Your Social Media Accounts
If you’re still posting onto your social media accounts directly from Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, please stop.
What a gigantic waste of time when you have posting systems such as Hootsuite, Buffer, and SEMRush.
They allow you to post onto several platforms all at once, so why would you use the native platforms?
While the latter two only really offer a premium paid subscription, Hootsuite does have a free account that allows you to manage up to 3 social media accounts.
For most businesses, this is more than enough. Hootsuite does a great job of hiding its free listing, but conveniently, here’s a link to the Hootsuite Free Plan.
Work Out Your Content
Most people don’t realise, but creating and planning out your content consume a huge amount of time.
This is why most social media management packages, will likely cost a bit more than you had anticipated.
In order to save you time, we highly recommend working out your content at least a month in advance. You don’t want to get to the day when you’re meant to be posting and you’re stuck for content.
That’s how you end up publishing junk for the purpose of publishing. That isn’t of value to your users and isn’t going to encourage growth, engagement, and sharing of your content.
Social media should be used to tell a story about your business, so share employee news such as work anniversaries, share case studies, company milestones, and try to avoid anything in the form of selling.
For extra social media content, you could also look at your current archive of blogs, could you split some of your blog articles into several social media posts?
This article covers 5 DIY social media tips, we could easily turn this into 5 separate social media posts discussing each DIY tip individually.
Work smart, not hard.
Work Out Your Schedule
Now that you’re set up on a posting/schedule platform such as Hootsuite, and have your content worked out, it’s not time to schedule your posts.
Unless the post is of a time-sensitive nature and has come up last minute, in-house we schedule posts ahead at least 2 weeks in advance but prefer working on a monthly basis.
This gives you plenty of time to change your mind about posts, refine the captions, but most importantly, it reduces the pressure of always having to think about your socials.
That pressure makes social media not fun.
Get Your Staff & Users Involved
If you’re fortunate enough to have a team working for you, you should consider if you could get them involved in creating content for you.
Whether you task a department of yours to create blog posts on a monthly rotation, or you get your salespeople to take photos and VIDEOS!!! while they’re out and about meeting clients.
On top of think, consider whether you can get your customers or clients involved in creating content for you.
User-generated content is one of the most popular genres of current social media advertising as it gives it that touch of authenticity on top of the third-party endorsement.
Things like customer testimonials, unboxing videos, delivery videos, action shots, or simply a selfie while you’re having coffee with them.
If you want to get really fancy with user-generated content, you can run giveaways in exchange for user content. I would encourage you to speak with a legal professional first though, just to make sure you nail those terms and conditions.
User-generated and submitted content can give you content for months!
The Social Media Cookbook
We’re assuming that just like a business plan, you also have a brand style guide that dictates, like a recipe out of a cookbook, your company’s typography, colour schemes, how the logo and brand can and cannot be used etc.
If you don’t, you should look into it. It does wonders for brand consistency, but that’s a tale for another day.
Just like your style guide, you should look into creating a little recipe book for your social media content, but if you’re going to hand it out to your staff to use, try to keep it to a single A4 page. You don’t want to overcomplicate things.
We’re creating these one-page social media checklists for some of our clients at the moment and they’re working an absolute treat.
They dictate how staff should take photos, how many photos we need, how and when they should be taking videos, and how they can easily submit the content so that both us and their managers receive the media.
It’s a simple way of introducing an easily replicable system into your business.
Or You Could Just Outsource It All
Social media is a lot of work. Even with all of the content available, putting a really good social media post together can sometimes take up over an hour, and you’re wanting to put together 2-3 posts a week at least!
That’s a lot of time out of your calendar every month that you could be using for far more productive things.
Your job as a business owner isn’t to be sitting there, working the tools of social media. Your job is to delegate the work.
And sure…
You could be ad-hoc about it but if that was working for you, you wouldn’t have read this far into the article.
About The Author
This article was written by the 3am Ideas Digital Marketing Agency in Perth.
3am Ideas was established in 2014 and has since helped over 100 businesses, large and small, with their digital marketing requirements. We’re fond of the relationship we have with our clients. It’s not about just securing that big job with you, it’s about seeing you through to the next big success and beyond.
Consider us a part of your team in helping your business achieve its goals!