Top tools for social media
Creating content is hard, but like the motivational speaker Les Brown stated “You don’t have to be great to get started, but you have to get started to be great.”
A trick to working and planning is to create consistency. A consistent habit, can allow you to breakdown what is difficult, into focused parts. As per Dwayne Johnson’s famous quote “Success isn’t always about greatness. It is about consistency.”
We want to share the tools that we use, that allows us to do this. Creating a single social post requires imagination, but there are plenty of sources that allow you to understand what works.
Rather than come up with something from scratch, find what works and adapt it for your business.
Tips to create perfect tweets.
Simplymeasured, a social media company, created a guide based on a study of over hundred thousand tweets from the top 100 global brands.
- They found out that using hashtags and links together will outperform just one or another.
- Don’t #Hashtag Overload: Tweets with more than two hashtags get 32% LESS engagement.
- Tweet Longer: Tweets with under 60 characters see 1/3 the engagement of longer Tweets. Brand Tweets that use more than 120 characters perform best.
- Clear Call to actions: Tweets containing the word “click” average 35% more engagement than the brand average.
Once we understood what works, we built up a list of subject matter:
- Help Guides. Give back to the community, even if it does not sell any new business. It will position you as a knowledge expert within your industry.
- Offers. Customers love deals, in fact we all love deals. Even your local supermarket knows, this with the famous BOGOF (Buy one get one free)
- Features. You add a new process or service to your business, tell your customers about it.
- Feedback. Create engaging posts, with focus on asking your audience. Conduct surveys and polls.
Then once you have your draft content, focus on the design. Like the early founder of Apple stated - Markkula “People DO judge a book by its cover”.
Your content should be polished and an easy way to accomplish this, with a minimal budget, are tools like Canva.
Canva is a freemium tool, that allows you to create really nice social image content. A picture tells a thousand words and according to Simply Measured social study “using Tweets with images average 2X the engagement of Tweets without images.”
Don’t have much imagery, we tackle this with two methods. The first is using copyright free image databases. Brilliant ones are Pixabay and Pexels. You will find a good selection of images that if combined with Canva, upscales the presentation of your business.
Our second method, is we embed the social content collection process into our business processes. We created a google drive folder, that all our staff have access to. From their desktop and their mobile.
Every department while working, can dump images, files, documents, videos in one folder. This will keep our marketing department with almost endless amounts of content to curate.
As per the beginning of this article - consistency is important. To help us with this, we use Buffer, a scheduling application. A social media posting tool that connects to up to 3 social platforms for free, and more on a paid subscription that is less than a few coffees per month.
The platform allows us to schedule posts for period of time. Our general messages schedule everyday, up to two weeks in advance. Allowing us to focus on a content ark. A story that is told about our services and brand, that really allows us to be systematic in our approach. And also allows us to focus on key pieces that in addition we post every few days.
Social media does not need to be difficult, the hardest part is designing the habits within your processes that will allow you to create a strong base of your communication. Again quoting Les Brown “Live out of your imagination instead of out of your memory.”
Written by Omar Moulani on behalf of www.wegetdesign.com