Knowing why you want to use social media and deciding on the goals you have is a great starting point to planning how you will go about it.
Follow these simple steps, and you won’t go far wrong:
- Decide on two or three goals you have that you want to achieve through using social media
- Review your target audience and customers, understand their characteristics, their ages, their interests, the social media channels they engage with
- Live a day in their shoes, once you know who you want to target then go and explore the social media channels they use. Find out what works and what doesn’t work. What types of messages get the best reactions, is it images, video, formal, informal?
Once you understand your customers and what motivates them to engage and buy, you can start to design and plan your social media campaigns.
Use websites to gather together images if you can’t design your own to make your messaging standout, but be careful of copyright issues, etc. Don’t just save an image from the internet and assume you can use it.
There are different image website you can use, such as Envato Elements, which provide paid-for images or free alternatives, such as Unsplash, that may not have the full range you are after but does help in keeping the costs down.
Draft out your messages and try to keep them short and to the point, people have short attention spans when reading social media messaging and so you have to get their attention and move them to the ‘call to action’ quickly.
It might be a good idea to test out the messages with friends, families and colleagues to make sure that they make sense and lead them to the outcome you intended.
Pride is a wonderful thing, but not this time, take all of the constructive feedback you can onboard and make the changes now before releasing your message on the world. Once it’s out there, it’s really difficult to get it back.
Now you have your messaging, it’s time to schedule your messages, so you know when to send them out. You can do this in many ways, but most will either use an online scheduling tool such as Hootsuite or a simple document that can be used to list what to do and when, like a diary reminder.
There are optimum times, based on research across sectors, to post your messaging;
Thursdays and Fridays are good times to post on Facebook between 1PM and 3PM or, if you want to post on a different day, try and stick to these timeframes.
Thursdays show the most active people on Twitter with tweets between 12PM and 3PM receiving the most interactions or, like with Facebook, if you want to post on a different day, try and stick to posting between these times.
Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at 7am – 9am and 5PM – 6PM to reach people before and after work on their commute will help to reach those who use this social media channel.
As it’s used mainly by professionals while their heads are in ‘work mode’ try to avoid weekends or late-night messaging as it is often missed and lost in the mass of other messaging that will have been posted by the next time they open Linkedin.
3PM provides the least interaction through this social media channel with 8AM, 12PM and 6PM – 9PM providing the highest levels. Posting during the week rather than the weekend allows for you to communicate your message more effectively although stick to Monday, Wednesday and Thursday for the most impact.