Social Media Secrets Businesses Should Know

There are situations when an auto-tweet, or any type of automatic response is appropriate and acceptable, like if someone just subscribed to a newsletter. But when a customer calls your airline “the largest, sh—iest airline in the world,” we don’t think that you should automatically be thanking them for their support!

Not looking after your business’ social media can be detrimental to your business. Like it or not, business owners must work on developing a strategy and understanding of these online platforms. Social media will continue to evolve alongside society and businesses will need to perfect their techniques to stay within the algorithm. Using social media as a free marketing tool that businesses can utilise to garner attention and growth. However, if you can not maintain your business’ online presence you will be excluded from reaching new customers. This is what many businesses struggle with.

Some common mistakes businesses make with social media are:

• Overly promoting: social media is a form of communication, a way of connecting with people. Consumers will be turned off if the only thing they get from your business is just evident advertisements.
• All take and no give: people love it when a brand is humanised, a simple like of a comment or a thank you reply can make consumers firm followers of a brand. Many businesses don’t bother to take the time to respond to any comments, which is another turn off for people visiting social media pages. 
• Inconsistent posting: social media is a fast-paced application that is constantly being updated. According to YouTube’s official blog in 2020 500 hours of video content are uploaded every minute. As you can see content is rapidly being uploaded every second of every hour, therefore businesses need to keep up. If not, social media algorithms will eventually be working against them and favouring accounts that can not only hold an audience but actively post. 
• Trying to use all forms of social media: your consumer audience may not be using every single social media platform. Businesses make the mistake of trying to be active across different platforms. On the other hand, if your audience is on multiple platforms, and sees the same content on each one, they may just switch off. 

Although there are many common mistakes businesses make on their social media platforms there are also some  lesser-known tips which many businesses fail to take advantage of. .

Utilising a Link Hub:

There are various free tools that utilise a link hub where people and businesses can place all of their social media connections as well as specific links that are easier for people to access. For example, you can add a link to your latest blog posts, social media account, e-commerce site etc. This is particularly useful for social media sites such as Twitter and Instagram that only allow you to include 1 link in your bio.

A couple  of examples of the LinkHub landing page is LinkTree, Campsite.bio, Lnk.Bio and Milkshake which are all free and affordable options. There are also more expensive plans such as Lead Pages, Short Stacks and Tap.Bio which have more features such as status updates on your profile performance and tracking engagement to these social links.

Measuring Engagement, Social Media Statistics and Call to Action:

It's important to compare and study the engagement of your posts. If there is low engagement on a particular piece of content you created then it's clear that consumers aren’t interested in that specific type of content. Similarly, if many people are liking, commenting and sharing your post, this positive reaction indicates followers and consumers are interested with what you posted. 

Additionally a way to ensure the content is suitable for consumer interest is to perform a competitive search engine optimisation analysis. Here is our blog post that goes into detail about this. Furthermore, a way to boost engagement is to have a call to action to motivate followers to access blog links and to your sites.

Only utilise specific social media sites:

Many businesses attempt to build their brand identity across all different social media platforms. However, it's a useless and unproductive tactic to expand the business as different target audiences will utilise very specific social media platforms. There is no point in aiming for all social media platforms when your brand’s target audience will only be utilising a few of them out of the many. Therefore, it's important to pick and choose wisely the platform you and your business want to concentrate on. 

Have a social media strategy:

It's hard to work on a business and maintain a social media platform at the same time. Utilising a scheduling site to upload your social media content at a specific time of day across all different platforms. It's easier to visualise and plan the content ahead of time, in order to maintain social media performance and as well as ensuring the content you produce has enough variety.

Social media will always evolve as society changes over time. However, it's important to understand the basics of these platforms to truly grasp the full potential of your brand identity. Although it’s free, if not used well you are lacking the ability to bring the brands full potential.