Social Media Content Beginners Guide.
Connect With Your Customers Across The Social Network
What Is Social Media Content?
If you have a social media account you’re not alone with a quarter of the planet on Facebook sharing content across the social network. With users looking to connect with friends, family or there favourite brands (including celebs and influences). As a business this presents an opportunity to also get your brand out there by posting your own social media content. So this could be a post about current events or the latest in your businesses industry or an inspirational post for your customers. In social media these are referred to as organic social posts compared to the paid social ads. Your goal is for your social media content to trend positively among customers. All your content reflects your service and the tone of voice with your customers. Every social platform has its own advantages and disadvantages with some communities more suited to your brand.
Why Work With Social Media?
Social media is not only free but a perfect way to connect with your customers on a more personal level. When you connect at this level with your customers it also creates more trust and a way to build customer loyalty.
In any successful marketing strategy social media is at the forefront. Twitter you can answer customers questions. Facebook you can organise events such as open days. Instagram you can inspire with imagery that reflects the best of your business and demonstrate your trending ability.
All these social networks present there own unique communities. So you have the opportunity to connect with many different customers from all walks of life directly.
Your main focus should be ‘interest’ as driving this will get you more interactions such as likes. That may impact consideration or action later in the customer journey. Your social media content can potentially be associated with all stages in the funnel, but this depends very much on your business model.
How To Do Social Ads Yourself
Firstly for your strategy need to identify which social channels are best suited to your business. In most cases Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are considered the standard for most businesses. But depending on your service more visual social media platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Youtube or Snapchat could be a much better fit.
We would recommend to begin by just focusing on either Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn depending on your type of business as these provide the best insights. You can take these insights and look to apply your findings to other social media channels further into your strategy.
Even before setting up look at your rivals social media content and what they are doing. You can quickly get an idea of what is successful. With these ideas put them into your draft content plan. Before starting you need to think strategy what posts will help you build followers, which posts will inspire and which will get you interactions with customers.
Starting Out
In your first month or two you should look to post regularly with more posts dedicated to building followers but still demonstrate you’ve got a range of content that will interest them. We would recommend to post a couple of inspiring posts so users can have a taste of what your social channel will be like to follow.
Then you should come up with a post that should be an incentive for users to follow or like your page before you start inviting followers. Good posts for driving followers could be a competition for a chance to win a price or for a chance to have your photo on the social platform.
To gain followers you can start by inviting friends and asking them to share. If your business has got email lists and you have permission you can email social links to these contacts.
Educate Yourself
Now to create successful social media content and a placed strategy these are skills that take practice. A good place to start educating yourself is HubSpot’s content creator courses.
When it comes to tools with Facebook and Instagram we would recommend getting to grips with the Facebook Creator Studio. This Platform is a one-stop site for uploads and gives you the most insight for free. Facebook provides a tutorial as you navigate through this social media content tool.
For creating eye-catching visual content you can edit imagery with Photoshop or GIMP these are good how-to courses for learning. But this can be time consuming so alternatively you could ask your customers to provide content that you are allowed to share. This also helps build repour with your customers and demonstrates to potential customers your positive relationship.
We recommend signing up to social media newsletters in our useful links section which can help for learning new tips and keeping up with the latest social media news.
The Future
After getting to grip with one social media channel look to expand by using your learnings when launching new channels. Re-using previous social media content can be a timesaver with these new channels. But be cautious that the content may not necessarily mirror its previous successes. All social media communities have different tastes and dislikes. But with your previous insight data and knowledge of the new channel you can see correlations such as demographics, locations and interests.
Finally, you can look to expand using paid social advertising to grow your followers further after establishing your channel.
Useful links:
Facebook Content Creator – Build your Facebook and Instagram posts here. With the best free insights and easy to add multiple users system.
LinkedIn – Their social media platform.
Snapchat – Their social media platform.
Twitter – Their social media platform.
Pinterest Business Account – Their social media platform.
Tik Tok – Their social media platform.
Sprout Social – A good source for social media tips.
Social Media Examiner – A good source for social media tips.
Social Media Examiner YouTube channel – A good source to learn social.
Our Blog – Learn about our work with social.
How We Can Help.
Social media platforms can get a bit overwhelming, each platform has its own unique tone and type of users. Further to this creating content is a skill that takes a great amount of training and experience to bring success. Not only this you also have giant like Facebook regularly adding new features and making changes. We’re here to help! We have experience in multiple social networks and know-how to reach the right users. Drop us a message and we can provide some free advice. If it still proves too much you can potentially hire us if we have space. Find the contact form here.
The Author.
Tom Haynes
Creating social media content professionally since 2015, has experience running multiple social campaigns including travel, sport and marketing.
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