You can have the best strategy for your social media channels, but if the execution is off you won’t reach or engage as many people as you potentially could. Since I find myself being a broken record on a few social media best practices, I thought they would be helpful to share widely. Here are five easy things you can start doing immediately to help improve your social media strategy.
- Engage with your audience
Social media is supposed to be social. Get into a conversation with your customers, patients, clients and other companies and organizations. A like or a simple comment such as “great photo! Thanks for sharing.” goes a long way to build brand affinity.
- Share links correctly
If you want your audience to click a link, share it as a link post, not as a photo with a link in the copy. Users are more likely to click on links that show a link preview and image than they are to click on the URL in the copy, especially on mobile devices.
Photos have greater reach than links so many people will share a photo with a link in the copy thinking it will perform better. The problem with this is that not many people will actually click the link in the copy. On Facebook, this is especially important because of click bait rules. Back in 2014 Facebook announced that it found users prefer to click on links that show the large link preview image and not on the URL in the copy, especially on mobile devices. Because of that, Facebook prioritizes links that are formatted in this way.
- Use proper photo sizes
When creating content for your blog or website, make sure the featured images for social media are cropped to the correct sizes. This is not only important for images in link previews but also when sharing photos directly. I recommend Landscape by Sprout Social for quick and easy photo cropping for a variety of social media sites.
Here are two examples of content that could have performed better if the images were cropped correctly.
- Pay attention to character count
For Facebook, the cut off is around 250 characters on mobile, but for LinkedIn, it varies widely with some posts showing a “…see more” around 117 characters and other showing up to 300. For Instagram, it tends to be the third line of text.
If you must go long, make sure the beginning of your post is likable since a like is the most basic form of engagement and most people won’t click to read more.
- Post when your audience is active
Check Facebook insights or Followerwonk for Twitter to see when your audience is active. Test various times and then check the analytics on each channel to compare results. Give your content a leg up by sharing it when you have a lot of eyeballs online to see it.
Now that you have these easy ways to improve that great social media content you’ve been writing, get to it and be sure to tag The Fearey Group or share it with us on our social channels so we can see how these tips are helping you!
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Read more tips and insights from The Fearey Group in our recent post on the Hottest PR Trends of 2017!