The skill of posting to social media is beyond posting to your personal social media page. On your personal page, its easy to quickly post a picture, a thought, a poem, and share a video without much thought. But to post to a company page, its not always that quick or easy. There is thought and planning that should go into posting that content. So, before you hire your 15 year old niece to manage your social media, ask yourself, would you ask her to manage a live interview with CNN about your business?
Posting the right content at the right time to the right people is an important piece of social media skill sets. The social media person should also understand the wild and wacky ways of the technology, because it also doesn’t really act like a newspaper, a magazine or even a website! It kind of has a mind and way of working on its own. And many a times, the social media programs will do things differently if you post a photo, as opposed to sharing the photo or adding the photo to a gallery.
What is the best way to share that image so that followers Like the image? What is the best keyword to use so your images and posts show up in the search engines? Did you create your own hashtag buzz? Have you mentioned the correct company in the post and the mention is linking? Have you thought about good questions to ask your audience to engage them, get comments and a response? Be interested in the topics and conversations posted by customers, followers, and partnering companies.
Before you tackle all the technical pieces and questions, you also need a strategy. First you decide what social media channels are the best places for your company and products to be represented. Not all channels are best for all companies. Content should be researched, read, reviewed and planned in advance with a good balance of sales vs fun content. Create a content calendar each month and begin planning a month ahead. Therefore, you will be ready to post balanced content ahead of time. When planning the calendar, you put on your thinking and searching cap. You get your hands into some creative digging and find trending topics, events, holidays, community events, fun days and trending social events. These are different topics than what is going on in the company. These are happening topics around the world, social topics that bring people together and get them talking. Be interesting so people want to share your content and talk with you or about you (in a good way!).
And before you can have a strategy, you need a very good understanding of your audience. Your customers are a good clue to your audience. If you sell children’s toys, your audience is typically parents, and sometimes grandparents. Sometimes your audience is the parents showing the child the posts. Your products engage children, so why wouldn’t some of your posts also engage children via the parents? Who knows, maybe the child is following your posts!
The voice of your postings is the company or group’s personality. A company has a vision, a mission statement and goals. However, those are not always the same as those for social media. Sometimes they are different. Social media should be a 3rd dimension to the business. It should be the down to earth, conversational, fun side of the business.
Dedication and passion are key to regular postings. This, I have found, is the most difficult part in posting to social media. You have to open that blank post and find something really cool to say, Like, follow, comment, interact and talk to other people, customers and companies. Be friendly, be social, be interesting and interested… and have fun!