Top Tips For Updating Your Social Media Accounts

This is the transcript from our new video so it may not read as well as a normal blog post would.

Social media is a valuable marketing tool in the modern world, and it’s a great way to reach out to your audience and increase the value and perception of your brand. If you’re just getting started with social media, today I want to run through my top tips for updating your social media accounts so that you maximise the use of this channel.

I’m going to look at five areas today. Starting from the top, when to post on social media.

Now, when you first get your accounts, you might be a bit baffled as to how many updates you should actually put live on social channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. The best way to do this is to start by posting regular updates and then monitoring the interaction you get from those updates. So for example, if you set a Facebook post live in the morning, at midday and in the evening, you can basically monitor it, see which ones are most successful. See which ones are most successful on which days, as well, because that can also have an impact. Over time, you’ll get a real feel for where your audience is engaging with the content that you’re sharing, and this will allow you to determine which times of day you should be posting.

Don’t forget, as well, that obviously you’ve got the weekend. If you can schedule posts while you’re in the office on Friday and Thursday, before the weekend starts, this is a great thing to do, because obviously, although you’re not going to be in the office to update your accounts on the weekend, your audience are going to still be looking at your profiles over Saturday and Sunday, either on their desktop or on the move on mobile and tablet, as well. So always allow for this. Set yourself up, it’s easy to go into any of the social accounts and schedule posts. If not, you can look at the tools which we’ll come on to later on in managing your updates and your accounts. So use this to your advantage, and then, like I say, monitor which times of day and which posts are working for you. This will give you a good indication over time, the more you use it, as to which profiles have the better effects on which times of the day. That gives us an overview of when to post.

Next up, how often should you post?

We get a lot of clients or companies come to us here at Koozai and then ask us. They’ll say that they’re on social media, they’re building a following, but especially if they’ve just got to grips with these social accounts to start with, they’ll say to us, “How often should we be posting?” Now realistically, this varies depending on the industry you work in and the type of social media platform that you’re using. For example, Facebook is going to have a different amount of posts that you should be putting on your account compared to, say, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, etc. I’d start off by saying that between two and four is a good amount of posts to update. Perhaps two for something like Facebook and maybe three to four for something like Twitter, because of the nature of Twitter, the fact that the feed is so quick, and a lot of information you see it, it’s gone. Facebook, it stays there for a lot longer, and you can get a bit more interaction from it. So let’s say two for Facebook, three to four for Twitter, and between two and four for any other social platform that you’re using, depending on the type of content you’re sharing.

Next up, what to post. You might have set up Facebook, Twitter, Google+, which is obviously great for your business and for brand awareness. The next thing, you’re sitting there in front of the computer screen, thinking to yourself, “Well, what am I actually going to share?” There are loads of things that you can do. Some of the things that I would suggest initially to share to your audience are, if you’re an e-commerce site, then obviously deals that are pointing to your website, to redirect the traffic to your site in the hope of conversion. Social media can act as a great tool for conversions.

You’ve also got things like breaking news and current affairs. If a news story has broken, maybe that morning or perhaps that week, and you’re sharing content related to that story, then obviously this gets people involved, conversations can start happening. Taking Facebook as an example, you might have a thread of comments that you can reply to. If this story gets updated, you can obviously share the second phase of that story, and you can keep the engagement and the momentum of that story going over time. So current affairs and breaking news is a great topic to cover, as well.

Latest offers, which we’ve covered. Any content that you’ve previously created on your site that you want to push out to your social channels, because it’s all well and good engaging in content marketing activities, but if you’re working on a blog, or maybe some technical interactive pieces, or infographics, or videos, where are you going to share them? Well, social media is a great place to add those, add the content that you’ve created, and it allows you to push them out in the channels that you know that your audience are going to be on already. So use it, use the owned sources that you’ve got and push out content. Whether it’s old content or something that you’re working on, as well, as long as it’s still relevant and specific, then use those channels to push out the content that you’ve created. So that’s an idea of some of the things that you can post.

Obviously, there’s more. You’ll get used to it over time as to the kind of things that you can add to your social accounts, but that’s a good place to start. Don’t forget, as well, with things like Twitter you want to be using hashtags. Also, when you’re mentioning other people, say you’ve mentioned a company or a brand, or let’s say a blog that you’ve been featured in, don’t forget to incorporate, if they’re on Twitter, the @handle with their name in it, as well, because this will basically notify them. So they’ve got a notification and they might re-tweet it, favourite it, share it out to their audience, and that basically enhances the exposure that you’re going to get.

In terms of managing your updates, obviously if you’ve started on the main three, which are Facebook, Twitter and Google+, there are ways that you can use tools, such as Hootsuite, Buffer and Sprout Social to log into those and basically add all of your posts in one platform and schedule them across those three platforms. As an example, you’d log into Buffer, you’d put your updates in Facebook, Twitter and Google+. You’d set the icons for where you want them to go, and then basically these tools act as a scheduling service for those social platforms. So instead of logging into Facebook, Twitter individually, you can do it all from Buffer. The only thing is to, obviously, make sure that once you set them live, you just check on a regular basis that those posts are actually being updated. That’s an easier way to manage it in one go, from one platform.

Some of them are more advanced than others. I think Sprout Social is paid for. Buffer is a free service, and Hootsuite is free as well. Sprout Social gives you more in terms of what you can actually track and monitor results-wise, as well, so you can see how well the posts are doing. They’re great platforms to use, and, obviously, it makes your job a lot easier if you are going to be hiring someone to maintain your social accounts and to track it. Great tools for seeing how well your audience are engaging with them, so well worth using to monitor.

Finally, number five is where to post. What I mean by this is which platform should you be using.

If you’re entirely new to social media, then I would suggest Facebook, Twitter and Google+, as I’ve been using those examples throughout the video, predominantly because they’re the main three. Google+ because, obviously, you’re going to get relevancy with Google, where it’s a Google end product. Social signals obviously help, anyway, with rankings. Twitter is great, as well, and Facebook for the engagement and images and things like that. They’re the main three that I would use to start off with.

Once you start using those and you become comfortable, and you’re happy with how thing are going with those and you know what you’re doing, it might be the right time to then, maybe, expand your social media accounts to platforms such as Vine, Instagram and Pinterest, depending on what it is that you want to do. Don’t give yourself too much. I think, from personal experience, it’s much better to have two to three well-maintained accounts than having six that are never really touched properly, except maybe one that you would just focus your attention on. So make sure that if you do expand from those main three, or if you decide to go with just Facebook initially, make sure that you invest the time to make those channels work for you, because they can work and social media is a great tool for your brand.

Coming back to those platforms again, it depends on what it is that you want to do. Vine is good for sharing short videos, so that might be another area that you’d want to branch out into later on. Pinterest is good for images as well, and so is Instagram. LinkedIn, as well, is another one that is more business orientated and can be used on a personal level for things like updates and posts as well. I think, initially, get started with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and basically see where that takes you.

So there are my tips. I hope that’s been helpful. Best of luck when it comes to maintaining your own social media accounts. For more information, please visit Koozai.com or any of the social profiles after this video.