Practical & effective social media tips for people who don’t like social media
Social media. There’s no getting away from it. It runs through everything we do; professionally and personally. It provides a platform through which we can keep in touch with friends and family, find & share entertainment, keep up with current & breaking news, and purchase items from our favourite online shops. All this, and so much more, makes it undoubtedly the marketer’s best friend. But, what happens when we know social media is integral to our marketing activity, but we just don’t like it!? Here are some social media tips for people who don’t like social media…!
Social media tips
Keep it brief: if social media isn’t your thing, and you try to spend as little time on any given platform as possible, you’ll be pleased to know that brevity is your friend. It’s unlikely that social media audiences will want to scroll through an essay in order to get to the point of your post. Instead, think of social media – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn – as a vessel through which you can guide individuals to your website; roughly 25 – 100 words, including (ideally) a link to a specific, relevant page of your website + photo or video.
Plan & schedule: planning out & scheduling your social media content well in advance is an incredibly powerful and effective use of your/your marketing team’s time. Spending half a day or a day every week or 2, planning, creating & scheduling your posts for each social media platform will help you –
- Identify patterns & trends in your social media content + activity and engagement around it
- Save you time overall – spending half or a full day every few weeks devoted to social media will allow you to be relatively hands off at all other times. Instead of spending an hour or 2 daily, thinking about and posting social media content, you’ll spend 5 or 10 minutes a day checking over any new developments such as new followers, comments or shares
- Focus on doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t
Analyse your statistics regularly: all social media platforms include some form of databoard/statistics display that you can view and use to your advantage. In fact, any and all activity undertaken online comes with the ability to track statistics. This is one of the key advantages of digital marketing, generally. Your social media statistics will provide you with lots of valuable information, such as:
- Post reach & engagement
- New followers
- Most popular post(s)
- Click through rate(s)
- Most popular times of day/days of the week to post
And much more.
You can use these statistics to help you plan out how often, and at what times, you post, as well as which platforms are your most engaged/popular, and the types of content your audiences enjoy most & least, which will help you streamline your social media activity – ensuring you can work smarter, not harder (or more!) on social media.
Keep it visual: wordy posts are great when you have something super important to say about your business. What I mean by that is crucial operational/service changes that directly affect customers, or details of closures/part closures. But, typically, the best advice I can give you is to make your posts as visually appealing as possible. A short caption with a beautiful or powerful image or a short video will serve you better than a long, imageless post. Don’t overwrite. Don’t overcomplicate.
Link to your website(s): wherever possible, link back to a specific page of your website. I mentioned it above, sure, but this is incredibly important to effective social media use. At least 80% of your social media posts should lead your audiences to a relevant page of your website where they can gather more information about the subject discussed in the post(s); whether a blog, a landing page or a contact form.
In short, social media is absolutely integral to the success of any modern business (or charity), but that doesn’t mean you need to spend hours a day on Facebook!
Planning out your content and observing what your audiences are doing will ensure you get the most out of your social media content and the platforms they’re on, without feeling bound to those platforms.
To find out more about my social media management services & prices, please visit my services page or contact me to discuss.
Sophie Porter: Content Specialist 