Social media will always be a staple of your comms plan, but it’s easy to get wrong. And hard work to get right, it seems.
This episode is a teaser for a great ‘Deep Dive’ episode I have coming up with the wonderful Helen Reynolds from the Comms Creatives in January so look out for that one.
Let’s dive in!
Links in this episode:
Sue, You’re shouting at tea: https://twitter.com/yorkshiretea/status/1232293516862218240?lang=en
What to do next:
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Full transcript (unedited)
Are you being social on social?
The best way to get better at this is to become a real consumer of social media. Think about who do you engage with? Like, what is it that stops your from from scrolling?
Remember that maybe you’re not your target audience.
An easy way to do this is to think about what kind of stuff do you like? And before you get strategic, develop what it is you like about social media. What do you think is good? What do you think works incredibly well? Have you got an opinion on things that you hate that you think that never works with me? In fact, it turns me off?
So before you get to the point of what am I trying to achieve? Who’s my audience and everything else? Just think about your own experience in the world. You can’t write a strategy without knowledge of the environments that you’re going to be communicating in.
Don’t sell, sell, sell make sure you balance your social media with social aspects and interesting content that isn’t all about selling.
The second one is BE YOURSELF
It’s difficult to create a persona on social media so accepting who you are as a brand or as a person and helping that come across on your social media is more authentic than posting about how pleased or delighted or another bank observation about something you’ve seen or read.
I share a lot of personal stuff on twitter and not so much on LinkedIn bu I share observations and fere content on LinkedIn with the odd post about what I sell (like maybe one out of every five or more posts)
Admittedly this can be hard for brands to balance and sometimes brands get it wrong or overstep the line like the famous Yorkshire Tea tweet last year (i will out a link in SN) but they were over friendly with someone who complained and a twitter storm ensued. No one got hurt in the example but it’s important to show personality and be yourself and operate in an environment you are comfortable in first and foremost. Noone wants to see press release after press release from a company on social media. It tells us very little about hat it is like to work with a company or what our user experience will be like of the product.
it’s easy to get right and wrong. And I thinking to yourself, I wonder if people listening that are working in businesses, you know, I can I can experiment. I’m, I’m my own boss, you know, so if the boss doesn’t like it, the boss just does try something different. But I guess if you’re working in a team, or you are in a growing business that’s trying to create a presence on social media, start having conversations internally about how you want to be perceived.
One tip is to try recording your words and transcribing them rather than carefully crafting social media posts.
The third one is pick one channel and hone your game
Because spreading yourself thin across all the platforms, you’re not capturing anyone’s attention by just trying to fit everything in. So if you enjoy LinkedIn, make the majority of your strategy work around LinkedIn, you know, if you know that your audience is probably going to be almost anywhere. So just make sure that the conversation that you have is exciting or insightful or useful to an audience in one place. And then you can move on somewhere else if you want to.
Now there is some testing to work out which platform is right, but you will get a feel for which one and also trying to be on instagram if you’re not very visual just isn’t going to work, now matter how much it works for someone else or a competitor.
Everyone should should experiment, because you might be missing out. And it might be that you go actually, that’s where our demographic is. That’s where everyone’s hanging out that that would be good for us. Maybe we should switch what we’re doing or switch our focus. That’s a good strategic decision to make. But trying to be on everything is exhausting and make you time-poor very quickly.
I hope you enjoyed this episode – if social media is your thing look out for a deep dive with social media expert and trainer Helen Reynolds of Comms Creatives where we unpick all of what you should be doing in 2022 to hit the mark with your social media.