Social media is in continuous change. Popular networks loose users and importance, meanwhile new networks are coming up and competing for the community’s attention. With the increasing number of networks and an increasing degree of specialization communication workers face the need to spread the efforts on much more networks than just Facebook and Twitter.
Social media professionals are fully aware, that seeding content on a variety of networks has enormous advantages for the visibility within their target groups:
- Customers and targets never keep their eyes on every post in every network. E.g. it’s good luck if they just review their Twitter timeline when you tweet or check their Facebook stream when you post.
- Preferences varying. You reach one prospect with an awesome graph. The next prospect prefers to read elaborate text, meanwhile others love videos.
Follow our 5 tips for social media posting and you’ll gain more effects from your communication efforts.
1. Enlarge your social media offer
The preferences and aversions of your targets and customers are very heterogeneous. And most companies communicate with more than one target group. Typical target groups are:
- Business partners and co-operation candidates
- Private consumer with a pursuit to satisfy emotional needs. You often need an emotional approach to reach them.
- Business customers who have defined needs for their business. You have to persuade with facts and figures.
- Reseller who want to increase their own business with your products. They want excellent business opportunities, information support and fair contracting.
It is rare, that you meet all the different expectations with just one post on one single network. You have to figure out who your different target groups are and where you can meet them best.
2. Integrate visual elements in your post
About 90 % of visual information will be remembered by a recipient, 50 % of written information will get lost. You ensure that your message stays in your targets’ mind if you put it in visual elements, like info graphs and videos.
3. More dialogue, less push
Social media communication is dialogue. Recipients are authors as well as creators of information the same time. Your targets want to be respected by you and your company. You should listen and engage in conversations.
- Place hashtags in your posts to integrate your message into already living conversations
- If you post a piece of content as an answer to a follower, mention him.
- Refer to statements of your community. That’ll help your credibility and strengthen the relation between your community and you. Keep in mind, that happy customers are your best influencers.
4. Stay in mind – post regularly
Uncounted pieces of content are published every day. Today, also your customers handle twice as much information than they did 10 years ago. Most information we retrieve will get lost if we don’t get reminded of it. You’ll need to contact a prospect about 10 times, before he decides to buy. Compare it to a good friend: if you call him 10 times a day, he’ll be annoyed, but if you don’t call him for months you’ll lose contact.
5. Stay efficient
Now you will think: ‘Yes, he’s right, but I don’t have the time.’ I understand. I avoided social media activities for long, because there are other things that had priority.
Forget about it! The devil says: ‘Yes, but…’ With every day new social media tools are introduced and you just have to figure out which tools support you best.
I love monitoring tools like Crowdfire and SumAll, because they help me to keep a close eye on my communities. And I tested tools that support the process of posting. For me Blog2Social enables me to multipost my blog articles to my social media profiles. So far this is not very exciting. Hootsuite and many other social media tools work similar. But Blog2Social additionally allows editing and individualizing the post per network in one well-structured pane – very simple and very efficient. It allows me to adapt each post to the specifics of each social network and community in one single step.
Inspiriert von der deutschen und spanischen Sprache, schreibt Marcus Friedrich nach einem Studium an der Goethe Universität Frankfurt & der Heine Universität Düsseldorf nun lyrische, dramatische oder zumindest informative Texte für die Bereiche Social Media & Online-PR.
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