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How To Get The Most Out Of Your Social Media

Grow your customer base, find real-time leads and share relevant content across all of your social channels

MydLooks Social Management Tools For Small Businesses Dashboard

It is no trendy overblown statement to say that if you are a decently sized business in 2017 you should be using social media by now. This statement is just as true as saying that by the year 2000 your business should have had a website. It is far more true than saying that you and everyone in your business should learn programming (let’s not even get into all that mumbo-jumbo). Social Media is clearly the largest consumer touchpoints in the market today:

  • Consider that when online adults aged 18–34 decide to follow a brand, they use social media to do so in 95% of cases.
  • In 2015, Facebook influenced 52% of all researched online and offline purchases.
  • 0% of ads generated an emotional response, whereas 20% of Facebook posts did.

There are many many more statistics that all point in the way of social media for business. But, it raises a lot of questions even for those business managers who use social media in their personal life, and especially for those who don’t. A run-through of your thoughts right now hopefully looks a bit like this.

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What Are The Benefits Vs Potential Drawbacks Of Social Media For Your Business?

The benefits of social media are quite clear to see so we just have to run through them quickly for you to get a complete picture of the potential for your business.

What Social Media Profiles Does My Business Need?

This is actually a fairly astute question to ask, because there are more opportunities for your business in social media than just Facebook. It’s our opinion that there are a few other social media profiles that it may be in your interests to maintain.

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Facebook

If you are even a small business in todays world, and certainly if you are anything larger, having a Facebook page is a must. While 10 years ago, the majority of people would have found your business online through your website, but nowadays people are increasingly using Facebook to discover online content. People search for businesses on Facebook in order to actively follow them. But main benefit of Facebook is that it suggests content to people. People don’t search for most of their content, it is delivered right to them by Facebook’s algorithms that are based on whether content is popular, related to them and if their friends are into it. So if your customers have a good experience with your business and you encourage them to like it on Facebook, then you should content posted by your business may been shown to friends of those customers, making it a great way to increase reach.

A great example of a popular Facebook brand page is Intrepid Travel. This travel company posts breathtaking images and clips of its tourist destinations that many people subscribe to. You probably have a few Facebook friends who like this page. Another is Threadless which is a more cutting edge example for two reasons. 1) It uses memes and meme aesthetics to garner interest from its younger target market, and 2) it is an e-commerce Facebook page. It actually sells t-shirts directly from the Facebook page.

Then there are also Facebook ads which allow you to pay money to have other people see your content (rather than just posting it and hoping it gets popular enough for people to see it). You can also target it to certain demographics with virtually unsurpassed accuracy (by actually inputting the amount of each demographic that you want it to be exposed to). This is a powerful advertising medium that is competitive with Google Adwords for price and benefits. This is definitely something to consider if you want to invest in advertising.







Start Talking to Customers And Communicating Through Social Media

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Instagram

After Facebook, Instagram is the second most popular social media site (Source). It is a photo sharing service, so think of it like a photo album that other people can view

Instagram is generally more the domain of people than businesses, but obviously it is still a large advertising space for businesses, so many have used it effectively. In particular, trendy brands with distinct visual aesthetics like Made in Sephora—a make-up company with a quirky pop-art style that many girls and women subscribe to for fashion inspiration and just because it looks nice. For an example that show’s the full potential of this social network, check out Staples which manages to post lots of neat, crafty, school-themed content based on its stationary range.

Instagram adverts are available, but be mindful that Instagram’s userbase is very skewed towards young women and girls.







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YouTube And Vimeo

YouTube is the 3rd most popular social media site, and it too is a very different area for your business to have a presence. As you probably know, it is a video sharing website, as is its competitor Vimeo. Videos are an area of content marketing that is notoriously expensive but with great potential to be effective. Videos are estimated to represent 69% of internet traffic this year because people prefer the immersive, audiovisual, easy-to-consume experience of watching a video. This is why despite the costs, many (mostly larger) brands are on YouTube. Some of the best YouTube brands include Disney which includes clips from its TV shows, and Nike which includes advertisements, sport video, natural spectacles and even web series.

But you don’t have to be a multinational corporation to have a YouTube presence. Some low-cost methods for creating YouTube content include:

  • Posting all of your television ads on YouTube (if you have any)
  • Creating image slideshow-style videos with voice-over narration for your business information, product info, and for news-like content.

YouTube advertising is a great option to spread your video ads to a wide audience. However, for the price of YouTube advertising, you want to have a high quality video ad, and this all costs a fair bit of money. But one key benefit is that YouTube ads aren’t avoidable unless you have an ad-blocking extension, and even then, on mobile they are an inevitability for most people.







Start Talking to Customers And Communicating Through Social Media

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Twitter

Twitter is the 4th most popular social network and it is based on the limitation that all posts must be under 140 characters length. This may sound restrictive, but it’s why the site caught on. People want brief to-the-point infobites in this day-and-age and this is why there is actually community resistance to the ways in which Twitter has relaxed its character limit in recent years.

The main reason why businesses go on Twitter is because they already have a Facebook account, so they just repost the same content (truncated to the first 140-characters) and linked to the original. There are many services out there and programming solutions to automate this process. The benefit is that you can channel the same content through a whole other social network, hence increasing your reach and your SEO even further.

For an example of a Twitter account that does this, look at almost any news company’s Twitter page. For instance, Sydney Morning Herald’s @smh just posts links to its articles. But, it goes a bit further by just posting a selection of links to the best articles and by making the 140-character description a snappy summation rather than a truncated snippet.

Despite having a character limit, Twitter is actually fairly liberal with its allowance of images, so you can definetly repost your best business images on this site. Check out this hot repost from NSW Police

Twitter ads are an option that merits some research in your online advertising campaign, but against Facebook ads they aren’t as good at targetting. To be worth it, they would have to be comparatively cheaper for you.







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Google+ And Google My Business

Google+ (basically: the Facebook made by Google) is far down on the list of most popular social networks, but that doesn’t mean that you should neglect it. That would still be wasting a significant slice of market reach and SEO in your online marketing strategy. You can use the same automation methods to repost your Facebook content to your businesses Google+ profile at the same time that you post to Twitter. There’s really no reason not to.

Now just to answer the obvious question: what is the difference between Google+ and Google My Business? Google+ is the social network that people and businesses interact on. Whereas Google My Business is the whole system of business tools provided by Google that includes Google+ but also insights, reviews and more. The main point is: make sure your business is listed on Google My Business, because then Google knows your business details and can include them in search results. Your business may be on Google+ but not Google My Business so make sure of it.







Start Talking to Customers And Communicating Through Social Media

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Tumblr

Tumblr is the 9th largest social network, but it hasn’t got the same potential for business. Tumblr is a social network that finds its niche not in content but in its culture. Tumblr has a very alternative culture—strong on left-wing politics and alternative lifestyles. If this is the market your business is targeting and the brand image it wishes to have, then Tumblr would be a social network holding a lot of potential. Companies that have established a presence on this network include Starbucks and Nike. These brands are youthful, fashionable and progressive. However, for a lot of businesses, the culture is too progressive to thrive in.





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Reddit

Reddit is a very unique social network. For one, it is anonymous which means that users don’t share their identities and don’t have very sophisticated profiles. Making a Reddit account for your business may be useful (for PR for instance), but not for posting content. There are strict rules against advertising and spam and a strong community resistance. Reddit is a social network that does not offer as many opportunities for businesses for these reasons, but it does allow sponsored ads. These can be targetted quite precisely by choosing which subreddits they will appear on. ‘Subreddits’ are basically forums for any topic under the sun and this is where people make posts in Reddit. Reddit’s community is strongly skewed towards age 35–44 US males but individual subreddits can vary widely. Consider the subreddits r/sydney or r/bored for some ideas for where to advertise.





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Pinterest

Pinterest is an image-board website. So essentially it is like Instagram, but it is less popular and with a demographic that is somewhat older but still predominately women. This is another place to re-post your businesses images and link them back to your main site. These backlinks will give you SEO and also additional streams of potential customers.



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LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the social network for employment and business. Individuals who are interested in employment make profiles on this site and can get suggested with your company if you are hiring. Companies list themselves on this site so that individuals can list themselves as working for that company, and this establishes credibility and solidifies networks of connections as a result.

Basically, you should make a LinkedIn profile for your business if only so that your employees can link to your business when they list it on their profiles. This social network is about networking and connections, and it’s clear that the networking of your business will be stronger as a result.

For a good example, check out the LinkedIn company page of Harvey Norman.

LinkedIn advertisements are possibly one of the best ways of targeting jobseekers. In any case where you want to target businesspeople, LinkedIn advertising should be one of your go-to options.







Start Talking to Customers And Communicating Through Social Media

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Creating A Brand Personality

As a business, using social media is probably the most human thing you can do. It gives you a face—the same face that individuals have online. You can comment, post memes and do everything that a person can on social media.

Hence this is the area of marketing where having a brand personality is the most vital. You need to decide on a personality that represents and reflects your company, and then carry through with that through all of the posts you make.

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What Brand Personality Defines Your Company?

This is an important thing to nail down, so you should have a meeting with your marketing people and your executives (if you have these) to establish it officially. To come up with this brand personality, you should be asking the following questions:

  • If my company was a person, what would they be like?
  • What kind of personality does the target market relate to?
  • What kind of person are the target market? (And should we be like them or different?)
  • How does our brand personality rate in each of the ‘Big Five Personality Traits’—openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism?

Just keep in mind: brand personality is not the same as brand identity. Brand identity is the ‘image’ of your brand, e.g. like how McDonald’s is red and yellow but this is different to an actual personality. The two should make sense together though.

Writing Content With Personality

If you’re a company with more than one person writing the social media content, then you would do well to have a style guide. If you are a smaller company, then you need to keep the things in this section in mind when you are writing, but you could still write a style guide for yourself.

A style guide doesn’t need to be long. It can be a short, bullet-point summary. In it, you should write the elements that define the brand personality that you should maintain throughout all your content. This includes:

  • Vision/personification of the brand personality. I.e. if they were a person, they would be: male, 40 years old, tradie, anglo-saxon
  • Tone
  • Grammar
  • Point of view
  • Brand identity (your style guide could include this as well, such as: logo, colours, style)
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Managing A Social Media Account For Your Business

To manage a single social media account for your business, all you have to do is make an account with the social media site like you would if you were just an individual making this for themselves. But, then you will have to take different steps to use this account as a business rather than an individual. The steps involved depends on the website, so here is a quick breakdown as a guide:

Facebook

Facebook’s terms of use dictate that Facebook accounts are meant to represent people. They are very strict on this and are actually in somewhat of a crackdown at the moment on fake accounts. The site does not scruple from suspending accounts it suspects to be fake and then making you go through a slow appeal process to try to get it back. Basically: businesses should make Facebook Pages instead. This is the Page of the brand Adidas as an example.

To make a Facebook Page, go here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.

Instagram

Instagram is straightforward: business accounts are the same as normal user accounts. Just make a new account on the app and then make sure you link your businesses Facebook and other accounts to it if applicable.

Twitter

Business accounts are the same as user accounts.

Just note: you will want to choose a nice short and sharp Twitter ‘handle’ for your business (e.g. @Adidas), but it may be already taken. Twitter prohibits the sale and purchase of these handles, and you can read about what to do about this here. But in short: you just have to search until you find an available name, using as much capitalisation, abbreviation, hyphenation as neccesary or else resort to breaking the rules (which we don’t endorse, but it is obvious that many companies do).

Google My Business And Google+

Your business may have its own Google account, in which case it is ok to just make a Google+ profile for this Google account like you would if you were just a person making it for themselves. However, Google has released Google My Business especially for businesses, with features that specifically benefit businesses, so it is better to head over to Google My Business and create a business page.

LinkedIn

The full instructions to make a LinkedIn Company Page are here.

In short: click the ‘Work’ icon on the top-right corner of your homepage, then click ‘+ Create a Company Page’ and then go from there.

Social Accounts That Have The Same Profiles For Businesses And Regular Users

YouTube, Vimeo, Tumblr, Reddit and Pinterest all have the same account registration for both businesses and normal users.

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Managing Multiple Social Media Accounts

Managing a single account is not a rare skill, because it’s so similar to the way that we manage our personal social media accounts. The real differences come in when as a business you must manage multiple social media accounts. This is where you want to be using some kind of tool or system so that you aren’t posting the same or a similar thing to multiple accounts manually. This is called social media automation.

The tool that always gets mentioned first and foremost when it comes to social media management is MydLook's Social Manager Tool. This is what we use and it is a powerful tool packed full of features. Here are just some of the things it can do:

  • Post the same content to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and virtually all other major social media networks
  • Schedule content to be posted at a later date
  • Schedule to post a list of content from an uploaded spreadsheet
  • Provides dashboards to oversee all your social media accounts at a glance
  • Can track conversions and other marketing statistics


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Get content relevant to your industry that you can post on social profiles

Updating With Fresh Original Content

Finally, the actual content itself that you publish is very important. It must be new and original, or, to use the marketing term: it must be fresh

Google and other search engine algorithms rank websites highly if they publish content that is new, original, regular, voluminous and popular (and a whole lot of other stuff, some of which is too detailed to get into, some of which is known only to Google). To rank highly on Google in this day-and-age i.e. on the first page, then you want to be publishing this kind of fresh content (note: if you only want to rank highly on Google for very specific searches with low competition from other websites, then this may not be as necessary).

Most websites that rank highly publish articles. These articles are informative and entertaining, so people read them, and this boosts the website on Google. Also, the articles have keywords in them that boost the website higher on searches that relate to those keywords. So for instance, there is a website for a pants company that publishes an article called ‘The Wild Western History of Denim’. The article includes the keyword ‘denim’ in the title, and this relates to the company. So whenever someone searches for something denim-related, the company will rank more highly on Google. So for the search ‘denim Sydney’, the website may rank on the first page.

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What Kind Of Content To Post

This partly depends on the social media platform. So for LinkedIn, business-related matters and serious content are the essence. For Twitter and Facebook, entertainment is a higher priority. Here are the main forms of content that businesses publish:

  • Articles
  • Memes
  • Quotes

Articles

Articles are a great way to pack a lot of keywords onto your site. By publishing articles under your site’s URL, you are doing your search engine rankings a huge favour. After you make your articles, you are going to want to make sure people see them, and that’s where social media comes in. You publish the articles to your social media profiles and let the social conversations begin.

The key to getting a lot of people reading your articles is to have a punchy headline. A lot of marketers cite Buzzfeed as an inspiration, but I think that’s them being a bit edgy. You don’t want people to associate your business with trashy clickbait. For great headlines, read the New York Times or other respectable newspaper. Or for the best headlines out of anything, check out The Betoota Advocate (comedy newspaper).

Memes

Memes are a way for businesses to relate to the notoriously marketing-averse Millenial demographic. However, there is a considerable risk that you will miss the mark in the fast-changing and complex world of meme culture. For some hilarious marketing meme blunders, check out this subreddit. It probably helps to study marketing memes that have failed in order to find out how not to.

Marketing memes that don’t work:

Normal non-funny text in a meme format. Most marketing memes fall into this category. At the worst, it tricks people into reading some marketing copy in which they expected a punchline. At the best it is something like this (still very bad):

Computer Science kids have no chill when it comes to our professor's bad memes. from FellowKids

Using meme icons just to ‘fit in’. It’s kind of like: hey we use fidget spinners, we speak lolcat, we’re so hip guys

God is really fucking dead. from FellowKids

Unoriginal humor. Millennials have so much filtered, viral content at their fingertips that most marketing memes won’t cut it unfortunately. It is difficult to be original, especially when you are limited by the brand image and conservatism of your company. So.... don’t make memes unless you have a good idea. E.g. this one just doesn’t cut it:

Bagel Bites "don't worry it's dank" from FellowKids

Quotes

What I mean by this is, when a company just posts a Tweet or some short text on Facebook. This is something that they think is interesting/funny/important and above-all quotable. It’s the kind of thing that can be shared and quoted in articles. This is the voice of your company, so if you have something worthwhile to say, you should post it (but make it pithy).

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