If you’re interested in social media marketing but don’t know where to start, try establishing best practices for your marketing team. The following do’s and don’ts will be especially helpful for small business marketing teams, but can benefit any social media user looking to expand their readership.
Do: Share Other People
If your company is a content powerhouse and consistently churning out great content, it may not occur to you to share outside resources. But there are a multitude of advantages to sharing outsider content. Not only will sharing other people allow you to build connections in social media, but you’ll also cultivate the image of a brand that’s customer-serving rather than self-serving. Additionally, sharing relevant content from outside sources allows your team to take a break without denying your readership access to new material.
Don’t: Spam Replies
If you use automation software or scripts to facilitate your social media presence, you may be tempted to hand off the bulk of the work to a programmed bot. Although bots and scripts can create a uniform social media presence, it’s advisable to limit their interactions with your customers or followers. For instance, if your bot replies repeatedly to a frustrated customer, they may make that customer feel disregarded and abandoned, while if that bot replies once to let the customer know when to expect a representative of the company to contact them, they would be facilitating customer service without adding to customer frustration.
Do: Schedule Posts Wisely
Whether you’re using automation software or an intern, setting up an audience-specific schedule can be vital to social media marketing. Sharing great content when no one is available to read may result in buried content, so try to determine the best time frames for your audience and keep a consistent social media schedule. For instance, if your target audience consists of small business owners, try to share material around their lunch hour or after the traditional work day is complete.
Don’t: Recycle Irrelevant Content
Social media marketing requires a lot of attention and effort, but if you’re not able to produce content on a regular basis, you may fall back on recycling previous posts to build your online presence. Recycling older material, whether your own or someone else’s work, is a great strategy for building new readers, but the material needs to be relevant. Periodically read through old posts to determine if they’re still relevant to your readers or if they’ve outlived their usefulness.
Although there are many more do’s and don’ts for social media marketing, these rules make an excellent starting point to bolster your readership and get the most out of social media.