Small and medium scale business that try to create and manage a presence on social media, seldom get it right at first go. Here is a quick checklist that can get them where they want to be.
1) Integrate all you channels
If you are actively using a bunch of social media platforms, you should consider giving a link to those on your website. Facebook in particular lets you add various kinds of social plugins. Social plugins will help you convert some of your website visitors into Facebook fans if they end up liking your page through the plugin.
2) Visual Branding on Facebook
Make sure you are taking advantage of the various branding possibilities on your Facebook page. For starters you can have a good cover pic. Cover pics can talk about promotion, testimonials, can have your contact number displayed in a bold fashion for getting people’s attention, etc. Another place where you can actively brand your business is while you make your posts.
3) Filling up the timeline with relevant milestones/events
The Facebook timeline gives brands an option to showcase their milestones. It could be the launch of a new product/service or a workshop/seminar that you will be conducting, etc
4) Timing of Posts
There is a pattern when it comes to people’s engagement with a brand’s content and this overlaps with time frames when people are relatively free during the day. Usually the best times to post will be: 9 am – 10am, 1pm – 2:30pm and 8pm-10pm. You can experiment and see which time is the best when it comes to your page.
5) Slideshare for credibility
If you have content that you think is scientific or whitepapers or just a couple of slides on a topic, I would advice you to start a slideshare account for your company and put that content out there. It goes without a saying that the slide deck will also have ample branding and a bit about your business and how people can reach you. Since slideshare tells you how many views your docs get overtime, it becomes a clear indicator of your brand’s visibility.
6) Blogs with social integration
Having a blog can be very helpful. With a few add ons such as the provision to share the blog posts on various social media channels, your blog visitors will find it very easy to share an article with their friends.
7) Photos/Images for engagement
Photos from a recent event can help attract a lot of visitors to your page. Tag some of the familiar faces and you will notice that there is a lot of engagement.
8) Digital Ads
Organic growth on FB has become increasingly hard. You can allocate a small budget, maybe 2-5 dollars a day, and run Ads. Create 2 or 3 different variants of the Ad with different goals.
9) Team Enrolment / Personal Branding
If you have a lean organisation, then your brand will ride on each of your team member’s credibility and network. You can see how you can help your brand grow by tapping into your own network and not just rely on your brand’s community. It will be important that each team member becomes the biggest fan of the brand, spreading the word by sharing the brand’s content across their own social profiles. This is where having that blog or that slideshare account is really going to make that difference.
10) Call to action
Let you posts carry some kind of call to action. A lot of your content is taking people to a source outside of your brand through links. See how much of this traffic can be redirected to your brand if you can recreate similar content or paraphrase content and use it within your site.
11) Analyzing your website traffic
Studying your current website traffic will give you ample understanding of a visitor’s behaviour. It will be important to note what are the pages that do not get the kind of attention that you intend it to, and how you can bring it to the surface through necessary redesigns on the homepage or another page. Over time you should also be able to study ’Social Referrals’, the traffic that your website gets through social media channels.
12) Active tweeting
You may already know that on twitter the tweets get organised around a specific hashtag. You can identify hashtags that your brand can actively scout for and the moment a tweet comes out with that hashtag, you can tweet back to that person about your brand or with a link to your site/blog post, etc in a positive and enriching way rather than a mere marketing way.
13) Set realistic goals and track them
Put up a board/chart at your office and track the key metrics across your various channels.
Facebook – Total views of all content posted in a month, unique people who saw your page’s content, total engagement (likes, comments, shares) on your content, community size
Twitter – Number of mentions/retweets got, number of tweets put out, number of followers gained, number of people followed
Slideshare – number of slides uploaded, number of views on all the slides, most viewed slide, number of followers, shares/tweets that a recently uploaded slide got
Youtube – Video Views, comments
14) Campaigns
Here is a resource from Facebook where you can see the kind of campaigns that brands run to engage their audience. This will come in handy when you want to design your own campaign on facebook.
http://www.facebook-studio.com/gallery
