Kelly Shepsko
Spring is finally in the air and while it took long enough for the northeast to warm up, we’re in the clear and are excited to get outside and enjoy some beautiful weather! I don’t know about you, but I’ve been itching to get back on my beach cruiser and enjoy the sunshine. I’ve also been anticipating opening up the windows in my home and getting some heavy spring cleaning done, which feels long overdue after our prolonged winter.
Most of us take on some type of spring cleaning this time of year, whether it’s scrubbing your home from top to bottom or deleting old files off your desktop. However, it’s also a good idea to go through your company social media accounts and see what’s working, what’s not and what can be improved. Now is the time to make a change if you’re not meeting your marketing goals for the year. We’re at the start of the second quarter—and it’s a great time to spring clean your social media to get back on track.
While social media marketing opportunities and results vary from business to business, there are a few practices that can be followed that have really helped us and our clients generate traffic, leads and sales. Here are some must-haves for managing your social media this spring:
1) Eye-catching graphics
Images are playing a bigger role on post placement in the newsfeed, influence and capturing attention in social media feeds on all platforms. It’s never been more important to incorporate eye-catching graphics into your social media posting schedule. If you have a designer on your staff who can provide you with visuals for your social media posts, then great! If you don’t, there are plenty of programs that will help you design beautiful images that will not only be easy to make but look sleek and professional. One is a software named Canva; a social media marketer’s best friend.
I use this software almost every day and don’t know what I would do without it. It even provides templates and pre-set dimensions for graphics, so you can optimize your graphics for different social media platforms and quickly create stunning images. The best part about it? The software is free, but you can purchase extra elements for your designs for a dollar each. If you’re not looking to spend money, you can upload your own images, too! It’s a win-win situation. Try it out here.
2) A social media strategy
If you’ve just created your social media profiles and update them whenever you have time, you’re one step ahead of your competitors who aren’t yet on social media, but you’re still a ways to go. Before you post, make sure you have a purpose—and this purpose should be determined by a social media strategy that’s created before you start. Your strategy should be followed diligently, whether it is an overall strategy or for a time-specific campaign.
Before you post on social media, make sure you’ve made a commitment to post consistently, whether it’s once per day, twice per week and so forth. There’s nothing worse than checking out a company’s Twitter and noticing that they haven’t tweeted in a year, because then it insinuates that they might not exist anymore or they simply lack interest in providing valuable content to their followers. Why would someone want to follow a page if it hasn’t been updated in a while?
3) A budget for social media ads
Unfortunately, some social media platforms now make you pay to play. The most prominent social media platform that doesn’t give businesses much free marketing exposure anymore is Facebook, the largest social media platform out there. Facebook used to be a great way for businesses to get exposure for free, but they are making it increasingly more difficult for business page posts to show up in a follower’s newsfeed. For example, one of our clients has almost 3,000 Facebook “likes”, but Facebook claims that an average post only reaches around 15 of their 3,000 fans (without being sponsored with ads). That is RIDICULOUS!
One way to overcome this is to encourage your followers to subscribe to your page so they’ll always receive your updates in their newsfeed or to dedicate a budget to a paid ad campaign. You can choose the amount of your ad budget, and of course, you’ll get the visibility you pay for, as long as you optimize your ads correctly. Social media ads are wonderful because you can choose all different objectives and drill down your target audience to the T—and your posts will be seen by a large audience. You can also choose any budget beginning at $ 1.00 per day. Learn more about Facebook ads here.
4) Analytics—and the time to review progress
Finally… after you’ve dedicated the time to a consistent schedule and have sparked some activity on your profiles, it’s imperative to take a look at the numbers to see what was effective and what wasn’t. We use HubSpot, HootSuite, SimplyMeasured and Google Analytics to get different angles of our results to review some important criteria:
- Amount of clicks
- Amount of impressions
- Best time of day to post
- Number of interactions
- Increase/decrease in followers
If a particular post has sparked activity, make sure to take note and post similar content in the future to keep your audience interested and engaged. You must know your results to make improvements!
So when you do decide to bust out the mop and broom, don’t forget to check your current social media plan, too, to trash what’s ineffective and polish what seems to be working. When it comes to social media, you’ll find that there is a lot of change, as well as trial and error, so it’s imperative to try new things and keep evolving your strategy!
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