Top tips for getting the best results from social media

Rosie Evans

Rev Marketing

What is it and why should I care?

What is social media?

• Websites and applications that enable users to create and share content

Social media channels revolve around:

• Collaboration

• Participation

• Transparency

• Digital word of mouth

Engagement

Benefits of social media

• Speed

• Reach

• Your story

• Their story

• Google & friends

• Website traffic

• Reporting

Popular social media platforms

• Facebook – 900 million monthly visitors

• Twitter – 310 million monthly visitors

• LinkedIn – 255 million monthly visitors

• Pinterest – 250 million monthly visitors

• Google+ – 120 million monthly visitors

Your audience and social media

• They are already there!

• What they want…

–Valuable

– Funny & entertaining

– Interesting

–Relevant

– Timely

–Polite & professional

Getting started

Make a plan!

• SMART goals: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and tangible

• Identify key dates

• Target audience

• Measurement

• Tone of voice

• Content: What, frequency, who, when?

The content calendar

• Piggyback relevant events

• Write a blog

• Bulk schedule

• Leave room for spontaneity and breaking news

• Set yourself targets, eg: – 2 scheduled Twitter posts per day

– 2 pieces of engagement on Twitter per day

– 1 hour of engagement on Facebook per week

– 3 photos on Facebook per week

Who?

• Assign the responsibility

• Give deadlines

• Make the rules clear

• Define your tone of voice

• Junior team members

Hints and tips

Twitter

• 140 characters incl. spaces, link & photo

• Use @tags and #tags

• Leave space for RTs, eg RT @Jotul_UK = 13 characters

• RT and reply to other people

• Follow followers of competitors, suppliers, regional accounts etc

• Meaningful engagement

LinkedIn: Personal

• Headline & photo

• Profile being complete and appropriate

• Personality, passion, professionalism

• What do the readers want to know?

• Contact information

• Tailored messaging and advanced search

• Groups

• What is the purpose of LinkedIn?

LinkedIn: Business Pages

• Are they looked at?

• How to expand reach

• Frequency & updates

• SEO

Facebook

• Visual but vary posts

• Keep it short and sweet

• Use @tags and #tags

• Shorten links

• Like and comment on other people’s content

• Invite people to like or visit your page

• Boost posts

Blogging

• Structure

• Style

• Topics

• Deadlines

• Monitoring

• Writing for the web: reverse pyramid & F-scanning

Top tips

1. Be valuable and interesting

2. Share and engage with targeted people’s content

3. Listen and respond

4. Watch your competitors

5. Take advantage of opportunities – piggyback on existing campaigns

6. Measure!

Tools and measurement

Tools: Hootsuite.com

• DO use it to:– Bulk schedule

– Set up searches on your keywords

– Monitor and engage with conversations

– Shorten URLs

– Identify popular content

• DON’T use it to:– Send the same message across multiple platforms

Tools: SumAll.com

• Use to monitor Twitter performance

• See your reach and which accounts helped you achieve it

Tools: Facebook & LinkedIn

• Identify:

– Popular content

– Best time and day to post

– The demographics of your connections

• Download your data from Facebook

What to measure

• Use a traffic light system:

– Red = reduced too far

– Yellow = reduced but ok

– Green = Improved

Questions?