Make social media work for you

Taking a strategic approach to your social media has many advantages including:

• Turning customers into brand ambassadors
• Increasing brand exposure
• Engaging with customers
• Creating opportunities for two-way conversations

Here’s how we recommend that you get the most from the time you spend on social media. 

Stage 1 - Research

Start by looking at what you are doing now and make an informed decision about what’s working and what’s not.

Carry out an audit to understand your:

• audience behaviour
• competitors, and
• industry trends

Audience analysis

For every social media channel you are using, answer the following questions:

• What do you know about your followers?
• How many people are following you?
• Who do you wish to target and what social channels are they using? How does this compare to your existing followers?
• What is your posting frequency?
• Who are you following?
• What are the engagement rates eg – if you post something, what percentage of your followers are responding with a like, a comment or a share?

Content analysis

For each channel where you are active:

• Identify your top performing content – what was the subject, how did people engage, what day and time was it posted?
• Look at poor performing content - what was the subject, how did people engage- if at all, what day and time was it posted?

Competitor analysis

Check out your competitors on social media.

• How many followers do they have?
• What content works well?
• What content generates follower engagement?

Don’t just limit this exercise to competitors. Look at aspirational brands and observe what they do that works well and decide whether you could apply it to your social media.

Based on the findings of your audience analysis, content analysis and competitor analysis, consider stopping activity on underperforming accounts or shift resources to better reach your target audience.

Stage 2 – Set your social media objectives

Your social media does not operate in isolation, every action should be contributing towards achieving your overall organisational goals. To give your social media purpose, set yourself some social media objectives so that every action you take will move you closer to your goal.

Stage 3 – Decide upon your voice

Be sure that your social media voice is consistent with your branding. For example, if you usually adopt a serious, authoritative voice when communicating via your website or marketing collateral, then this is the voice you should use on social media. You are aiming to project one consistent business voice.  

To decide your social media voice, consider the following:

Character – do you want to be:

• Inspiring
• Approachable
• Professional
• Knowledgeable

Tone – how do you want to sound:

• Personal
• Honest
• Friendly
• Warm

Language – how will you speak:

• Jargon-free
• Non-clinical/technical
• Plain English

Stage 4 – Choose your channel

Based on your research, you are now in a good place to make an informed decision about the channel(s) where you should be concentrating your efforts to meet your target audiences. If you are not sure, take a look at our guide to popular social media channels. 

Stage 5 – Make good use of your time

It’s possible to waste a huge amount of time on social media so put together a content plan to ensure that every post or comment helps you to achieve your objectives.

As a rule of thumb, aim for 60% curated content ie sharing other people’s relevant posts and 40% created ie your blogs, news stories, videos, visuals, infographics etc.

Finally, if you are not already doing so, sign up for a basic Hootsuite account.

The benefits of Hootsuite are that:

• you can schedule posts in advance
• you can customise your dashboard
• monitor several social streams in one place
• view the analytics data
• the basic package is free!