Social media is a standard component of modern day marketing but it can feel a bit like talking to an empty room when you start out. Then you start rocking it and you’ve built a community around your business.
Here are fifty tips on how to speed that process up!
About your social media mindset
1. Do have a social media presence of some sort. 2. Don’t stress out about being on every single social media platform. 3. Choose your social media presence based on where your customers hang out. 4. Understand the unique culture of each platform (the people, the language, appropriate content).
About your social media profile
5. If you’re a solopreneur: don’t try and be someone you’re not. It’s exhausting and difficult to maintain. 6. If you have multiple people posting on one account, decide whether they will add their name or all postings will come from your brand. 7. Be consistent with your tone of voice, your content style, and your posting schedule (i.e. don’t post every day for two weeks then go silent for a month). 8. Complete every bio. Make sure people understand what you do and point them to a place where they can find out more (like your website). 9. Load up professional-looking profile pictures. Not you with a beer or in a group shot.
About connecting on social media
10. Follow other people in your industry. 11. Take part in conversations on other pages. Use those forums to show off your awesomeness (your skills, knowledge and experience). 12. If you’re going to an event, use social media to connect with other attendees. It sure makes the first day a lot easier! 13. Don’t forget that social media marketing is a skill that takes a little practice. Keep at it. 14. Don’t be a jerk. 15. Remember that you won’t instantly get a financial return on your time. Don’t expect customers to be knocking down your door after a week. Keep at it. 16. Respond to people who are kind enough to share your content or comment on your posts. 17. Always be polite. Manners matter. 18. Don’t hide the things you’re passionate about. 19. Scheduling posts can be really efficient but don’t automate everything. Tools that block automated and scheduled content are becoming more popular so your content won’t be seen. 20. Regularly go through the people you follow and disconnect from people who no longer interest you, you don’t talk to or you don’t remember. 21. Don’t worry about how many people follow you, like you or have circled you. Having a lot of followers can be an ego boost but it’s better to have a smaller, more engaged audience. Create a tribe of raving fans – not a crowd of ambivalent clickers. 22. Don’t respond to strange men who write and tell you how good looking you are. Ever. 23. Never delete complaints (unless they are just trolls being offensive). Respond to complaints and let everyone see that you are doing your best to make it right. 24. Remember you can’t control what happens on social media. That’s the point.
About your social media content
25. Don’t share an update you wouldn’t say to someone in front of you. 26. Consider different time zones and use the scheduling tools to spread the love across them. 27. Don’t just talk about yourself or send out continuous sales pitches. 28. Find and share other people’s awesome content, especially thought-leaders in your field. 29. When you share content, add your own thoughts or spin to the update. Ask people if they agree and get a conversation started. 30. Share some personality. People go to social media platforms to engage and interact, so make time to be casual, interesting, personal, delightful, funny and thought provoking! 31. Use a link shortener like Bit.ly for Twitter but don’t be afraid to share a whole URL on other platforms. 32. Mix up the way you share content, sharing a direct link to an article or an excerpt with a link, or an image from the article with a comment and a link. 33. Give people a reason to share your content. 34. Ask people questions (but get a little deeper than “Who hates Mondays?”!). It’s a great chance to get conversations going while you do some market research. 35. If no one answers your questions, start them off with your answer. And repost them at different times. 36. Never simply add your followers to your newsletter or email list. If they haven’t opted in, don’t force them.
About writing social media updates
37. Write in the ‘active voice’ grammatically. 38. Use verbs to motivate some action. 39. Remember that it’s emotions that make us act. Bring some emotion into how you present content. 40. Understand how many characters you can use before your update is cut off. Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn allow longer updates but don’t display the whole update at once. 41. If you know your update will be cut off, make the visible words work hard to get people’s interest. 42. Don’t spray one update out to all channels. You can share one idea or one post, but take a moment to customise the actual update so it’s a good fit. 43. Take a few seconds to read your posts before you hit publish. 44. The ideal length of a tweet is 100 characters as it leaves space for someone to RT and add their own thoughts. Twitter best practices state that “Tweets shorter than 100 characters get a 17% higher engagement rate.” 45. The ideal length of a Facebook post is less than 40 characters. Jeff Bullas reported that ultra-short 40-character posts received 86% higher engagement than others. 46. Don’t get too hung up on ideal lengths. Quality content will trump every statistics – every time. 47. Add a headline to your Google+ posts. 48. Google+ lets you format your posts including (but not limited to) *bold* to bold, _italicise_ to italicise and -strikethrough- to strikethrough. 49. Remember that LinkedIn will strip out all your white space and formatting, which can make longer posts seem like a wall of text. 50. And last of all, don’t take it too seriously. Social media is about being social. Enjoy yourself! Which tip will you apply? Can you add a great tip? Perhaps we can make it up to 60!
