Clever use of social media can give even the smallest brands on modest budgets access to disproportionately large audiences.
How, for example, did the Museum of English Rural Life, a specialist collection of historical archives at the University of Reading, gain more followers on Twitter than London’s O2 arena, a live venue with a capacity of 20,000 that has hosted Prince and Ariana Grande?
And how did the London Review Bookshop, a two-floor shop located in Bloomsbury – a stone’s throw from Paternoster’s offices – attract more followers than Blackwell’s, an international bookseller and retail chain?
The answer was both organisations succeeded in attracting large social media audiences by writing fun, amusing posts with playful meme content, generating high levels of engagement.
Making a big impact on a small budget naturally appeals to brands. However, many small, time-poor businesses and organisations only achieve followers of sufficient size to reward the effort through many years of slog. And many fail to achieve very much at all with their social media presences.
A good starting point is knowing exactly what you are setting out to achieve and how it will enhance your brand’s social media presence. an inactive or poorly-run account is worse than no account at all, given that it might be the first thing a potential customer sees when they enter a brand or company name into a search engine.
To improve your brand’s social media rankings and engagement, you need to make make content plan, then post at regular intervals with consistent presentation and tone of voice. You will also need to measure performance to find out whether what you are doing is improving or depleting your rankings and engagement.
Planning your content requires insights of a different kind. Finding out more about your brand’s target audiences will help you to produce content that appeals to them. Choosing the right time and regularity for your posts will get you seen. The right content will make sure you are remembered. It will also drive up engagement.
Posting regularly is crucial to improving social media rankings and engagement. Most social media platforms will give advantages to accounts that post with a predictable frequency and regularity because there is a mutual advantage in social media platforms doing this: their sophisticated algorithms rely on insights into the most effective placements for the adverts and promoted posts, and these adverts and promotions bring them the most revenue.
But be warned, posting more frequently at busy times can lead to penalties not rewards, so it’s not totally straightforward. If, for example, is your busiest sales period, it might be prudent and more convenient to optimise your social media strategy by trialling different approaches at quieter points in the year, then putting your best foot forward when you need higher engagement.
Measurement is vital to optimising your strategy. If, for example, a post on Twitter at 8am receives twice as much engagement as one at 1pm, or a newsletter campaign generates more return business than an Instagram post, these kinds of insights can help you achieve the same level of engagement in one week that might have otherwise taken a month.
Most social media platforms have some free, basic analytics tools for you to generate insights and compare marketing campaigns, but more sophisticated cross-platform content planning and analytics tools are available, like Hootsuite.
For example, London Review Bookshop’s feed promotes live events, new titles, and even short threads and microblogs about what’s going on in the store – content that reliably appeals to book lovers.
The construction machinery manufacturer Caterpillar uses a social media strategy clearly targeted towards its customer base. It shares a broad range of content on agricultural industry trends and advice from senior professionals on career progression in the construction business, alongside marketing content for new lines of tilt rotators, excavators and other products.
You should think about your content should in terms of ‘stock’ and ‘flow’: some marketing content will contain news about events or announcements taking place in the same content cycle but you can save some ‘evergreen’ content for – such as ‘tips’ blogs and product information.
Each different social media platform has distinguishing audiences and preferred content formats. The content you have produced for one may be suitable to use on others, with some adaptations – such as different aspect ratios for videos on different platforms, or longer text on posts for LinkedIn than for Twitter.
By creating different content for different platforms you avoid looking like you are gaming the system, which can in extreme circumstances lead to bans or account suspensions. Moreover, you should never try to artificially boost your rankings by ‘purchasing’ followers.
Ultimately, the personal touch helps online just as it does in real life. Face-to-face interactions with customers are the best opportunity all businesses get to encourage people to follow them on social media or leave them a positive online rating.