10 Do’s and Don’ts When Growing Your Company’s Social Media Presence
This list of best and worst practices will help you to create your own unique social media strategy and produce your most exceptional content moving forward.
Image Via @socialcut
Whether you’re just starting your company’s social pages or looking for ways to improve your company on its already existing platforms, I’ve put together a handful of social media do’s and don’ts to create a strategic, social media presence that your followers will love.
We want to wipe away anything that’s blurring how great you are and highlight what makes your business unique. Ultimately, the goal is to make yourself known as a quality business through your content, to pique interest in your prospective customers and community, and to raise the bar for the products and/or services of your industry.
While it does take some careful planning and time to execute all of the above, the outcome is well worth it. When done correctly, combining these practices with one another has been proven to boost engagement, customer leads, and website traffic. Now, let’s jump in!
10 Do’s and Don’ts When Growing Your Company’s Social Media:
DO:
1. Set Goals & Establish a Strategy
2. Choose Quality Over Quantity
3. Be Consistent
4. Create More Visual Media
5. Be Authentic & Humanize Your Company
DON’T:
6. Constantly Self-Promote
7. Forget to Connect
8. Market to Everyone
9. Ignore Trends
10. Be Boring
DO’s:
1. Do Set Goals & Establish a Strategy
Image via Austin Distel
Organization and goal setting are both integral to success in most areas of life. It’s specifically important when running your own business or working for a small business because you’re building something from nothing. Social media is an amazing tool when used to its fullest, and that happens to be with a bit of game planning.
First, write out the platforms you want to post on, and then map out the goals you have for these social pages. Are you focused on creating an identifiable brand? Advertisement for your products or services? Education? Website traffic? Connecting with your community? Perhaps, you want to put effort into all of these – no problem! A clear path to success asks that you clarify these goals and strategize on how to attain them. Otherwise, your aim is blurred, and effort gets wasted.
From there, you can brainstorm and organize the content you’ll post to pursue each specific goal. I suggest creating a social media calendar that sets these goals into place and helps you stay on track. Our team created a Google doc. that we use to collaborate and preplan our posts. You can also schedule and manage Instagram and Facebook posts in one place from Facebook’s Creator Studio. Depending on how you work best, consider marking out a couple of days a month to update and organize posts, so they are ready to go.
Beyond your typical posts, you may want to build a campaign that hyper-focuses on a specific goal of yours. It takes creativity and thoughtful planning to produce a fruitful campaign, but there are many resources out there to inspire and educate you through the process.
In the end, you’ll want to pay attention to your performance and progress. When you set goals and keep organized, it’s much easier to track your success. What’s working and what’s not? This will guide you to step up your game and continue growing. Side tip: keep posts and campaigns separate when tracking progress.
2. Do Choose Quality over Quantity
Contrary to what some may think, you don’t need to post every day. The quality of your posts is more important than an overload of content. There is such a thing as posting too much. Unless, of course, you have enough relevant and interesting content to do so. Otherwise, too much or repetitive content without much value can be seen as spam, which is a good way to lose followers.
Restaurants and other businesses that sell goods have an advantage in this arena because they generally have attractive content to show off daily. Whether they promote happy hours, appetizing menu items, or how they whip up a signature dish, they have more daily content to promote than, say, a software company. The main point is to ensure your content has a purpose and worth in some form. Don’t post just to have something up on your page.
Now, there’s quality in terms of value, but I also want to emphasize the importance of literal quality. The physical and creative quality of your videos and images convey the quality of your business. If all your images are fuzzy, grainy memes, it’s not going to communicate the value of your products or services. You must create content that presents your company the way you want to be seen.
To accomplish high-quality content, again, it’s important to brainstorm your content. Furthermore, you’ll need to use the right equipment to capture your content. A tripod or correct lighting can transform the entire outcome of a video. For campaigns or paid ads, you may even consider hiring a video production company to produce quality videos and stills for your socials. These are teams who have years of experience creating top-notch, promotional content that is results-driven.
Looking for a local Denver video production company to produce quality videos for your socials or website? We’d love to chat with you!
3. Do Be Consistent
While you may not post every day, you want to remain consistent. I will say that it can be tough to stay up to date if you have a lot on your plate, but again, it’s why I stress the importance of creating a content calendar.
Posting consistently on your pages is essential for your company to stay relevant and at the forefront of your followers’ memory. Especially as a local business or somewhere people visit because your posts are a constant reminder of somewhere they enjoy going. Otherwise, some followers will forget about you.
Inactivity will also cause people to unfollow your pages because they may think your account is inactive or that you’re no longer operating as a business. Don’t lose your progress or connections — stay on top of it!
4. Do Create More Visual Media
Image via Noble Bison Productions
Apparently, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and we process images 60,000 times faster than plain text [1]. In short, this means you should focus on creating more visual content!
When you think of social media, it seems obvious that it would most often be visual media. But you’d be surprised how many businesses use images with lots of text or share posts with paragraphs of information.
Videos and images are engaging and help you to stand out to your followers. They are much more likely to have a better recall of your brand than loads of text. Remember, too, that the physical quality of the content is a key element here.
Between videos and static images, videos are considered superior in terms of engagement and return on investment. In Wyzowl’s 2021 video marketing stats, they reported the following:
People are twice as likely to share video content with their friends than any other type of content, including social media posts, blog posts/articles, and product pages.
85% of people would like to see more videos from brands in 2021.
84% of video marketers say video has helped them generate leads.
84% of people say that they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video.
In 2018, people watched an average of 1.5 hours per day of online video. Our 2021 survey shows this has risen to an average of over 2.5 hours per day.
5. Do Be Authentic & Humanize Your Company
Image via Noble Bison Productions
Social media is the place to be your authentic self. Even when we follow business pages, we desire to connect with the people, not the companies themselves. We respond better to businesses that are more “human” than commercial.
This means showing your face, using your voice, and sharing your individual knowledge and talents. Ask yourself what makes you unique and distinct from your competitors. You don’t want your social pages to be hard to distinguish from others. Think about how your brand can look and sound different than the array of others in your industry.
DON’T:
6. Don’t Constantly Self-Promote
Social media is one of the greatest places to promote your business, but hard selling shouldn’t be your only type of content. For real, you can do other stuff on your pages, like educate, share stories, and related content, all of which build a whole profile and image of who your brand is. That, in and of itself, helps your followers connect and relate to you on a more personal level. This is a much stronger approach than aggressively promoting your products and services to audiences in every post.
Some ideas:
Introduce team members.
Tour of your business, office, etc.
Tips & tricks.
Educate followers on your industry’s history, unknown facts, injustice, growth, etc.
Share your own stories and those that inspire you.
Suggest products and other small businesses that are related or go hand in hand with your products/services.
Share interesting news related to your industry.
If you value taking a stance on certain social issues and want this to be part of your brand, then share those sentiments.
7. Don’t Forget to Connect
Image via @brookecagle
Social media is a community. For the same reason you shouldn’t only self-promote and focus only on yourself, you should always be connecting with others.
There is a Facebook group our business is a part of and the Administrator once posted about how easy it is to support and say something nice on others’ posts and content. This inspired me to make a greater effort to engage with other business owners and content creators. From then on, I always like and comment anytime I see something that remotely catches my eye. It only takes a moment to support someone else who is also working hard like yourself. Furthermore, it helps you make connections, build a network, and it gets your business’ name in front of more eyes. Aside from other businesses, there are also individuals, like your customers and followers, who you should engage with as well.
Tips to stay connected:
Speak and respond to your customers’ comments, and questions, and DMs.
Connect and support your local community and other small businesses/vendors
Join and participate in Facebook groups and online forums
Like and share others’ content
8. Don't Market to Everyone
I just published a blog of expert marketing tips, and the first one was to think like your customer. We ALWAYS hear this as business owners. But it’s for good reason that you listen to your customers and take the time to identify who your ideal customer is. In doing so, your copy and content will be much more focused and attract followers who will interact with your posts and respond to your CTAs (Call To Action).
Marketing is really about emotion and reliability, but it only works to the extent of your ideal customers. For instance, as an eco-friendly business, your sentiments will be best aimed at the “conscious consumer.” If someone who doesn’t think twice about this comes across your content and decides to start using reusable sandwich bags, then GREAT — but ultimately, it’s not for them. Your primary focus is your ideal customers because that is who will engage the most with your content and buy from you.
9. Don't Ignore Trends
Whether you’re running social media pages for your own company, or you’re a social media professional working for a small to mid-sized business, don’t ignore the trends! Professional marketing researchers are constantly releasing data on the latest marketing trends, and you should make a point to stay up-to-date on this throughout the year. This doesn’t mean you have to jump on the bandwagon and do what everyone else is doing, but take note and make it your own!
Sprout Social points out how you can subscribe to these newsletters that will keep you in the know. Personally, staying in the loop and subscribing to various newsletters and marketing professionals constantly motivates and inspires me to work harder – and better! One of my favorite copy wizards to keep up with is Laura Belgray.
10. Don't Be Boring
Image via @cocodrilomediard
We know, and we’ve heard, the word is out – people no longer have attention spans! Especially when it comes to social media, we’re looking for instant gratification and interesting content. If we don’t keep our content engaging, short, and easy to follow, then people move on quickly.
As I mentioned, I’ll see multiple paragraphs posted by businesses on Facebook, along with a flyer image with three more paragraphs in tiny writing, and it just kills me. There’s a place where your followers can go to read lots of writing – it’s your blogs! As for social spaces, our brains move fast. We’re swiftly deciding if a post is worth our time.
As a business account, these overly wordy posts, photos with lots of hard-to-read text, etc. it’s not exactly the type of content to draw the attention of your followers. When the majority of your content is visual, clean, and concise, then your followers will note your lengthier posts as something of importance to pay attention to. There are ways to share information and commentary on social pages, even flyers are ok, but make sure you hone in on your word economy and cut the necessary fat.
In the end, each online platform has its own “rules,” so to speak, from your website to Twitter and Tik Tok. They’re all their own thing. Consider what’s appropriate and what works best in each space during your brainstorming sessions, and constantly work on how you can create content that isn’t boring!
Summary
To conclude, social media is this very unique place where you have the opportunity to promote your business to a vast amount of people (for free!). This wasn’t the case years ago, so look at it as something to embrace and take advantage of! Don’t miss out on connections and opportunities by failing to be strategic and listening to your followers. Things are also constantly changing in these spaces, so keep on your toes! But honestly, keep it fun and be yourself. Your followers will appreciate that the most!
Do you need help creating high-quality video content for your business? We’d love to meet you and learn more!
NOBLE BISON PRODUCTIONS
A DENVER VIDEO PRODUCTION COMPANY
BROADCAST COMMERCIALS - MUSIC VIDEOS - BRAND VIDEOS - FILMS - ANIMATION & MOTION GRAPHICS - DRONE FOOTAGE - BRAND VIDEOS - WEBSITE BANNERS - SOCIAL MEDIA VIDEOS - CORPORATE VIDEOS- DEMOS - EXPLAINERS
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