Favorite Social Media Tips
It’s day 4 of our favorites! Today we are focusing on social media. Tomorrow, as the grand finale, we will be interviewing one of our web designers and discuss her favorite web designing techniques!
Navigating the social media world can be quite intimidating when newly immersing yourself in all of its glory. Social sites come and go in a blink of an eye. The ones that manage to stay mainstream and even grow exponentially, like Facebook, do so in large part because they are constantly evolving.
How are you expected to stay on top of all of these social media sites and their ever-growing range of functionality? Simply being consistently active on these sites will give you a bit of an advantage and help keep you up to date, but that won’t be enough, not by a long shot! In order to get the most out of your social media sites, you must also be constantly engaged with your audience. Our social strategists have been generous enough to share a few of their best tips on how to manage multiple social media channels. Check it out!
1. Don’t get scared away by tools that are meant to consolidate your efforts and help you.
If your company wants to be successful on Twitter, I highly recommend downloading a social media management application, such as TweetDeck. Our team gains tons of benefit from using TweetDeck, which aggregates tweets based on your own interests. Once you have downloaded TweetDeck, you will see a menu that is predesigned with “home”, “me”, and “inbox”. They are fairly self explanatory- “home” shows all the tweets of the people you follow, “me” shows tweets directed to you and “inbox” shows you your messages. What makes TweetDeck great is that you can choose other subjects to be shown on your menu. For example, I always have #drupal, #wordpress, and #webdevelopment so I know what people are saying about subjects that matter to me. There are other tools available but TweetDeck is easy to use and fairly popular. PLUS, you can also manage your Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare using TweetDeck.
2. Show your personality.
Too often, businesses are worried that if they don’t act completely professional at all times, they won’t be taken seriously. That, in all honesty, is far from true, especially when it comes to social media. Most social media sites will relay some if not all of your updates to your friends/followers. This means that if you are just posting links to your website or your blog posts, people are likely to be quickly bored and turned off by you. You’ll, in essence, just be another spammer to your followers. Instead, show your personality. Show the public the people and environment that stand behind your brand! Post fun pictures from around your office, create polls, post links to articles that are relevant to your field, etc. This will help give your brand a personality and encourage more interaction between your brand and your audience.
3. Create conversation and keep it flowing!
The whole purpose of social media is to increase engagement between you and your audience. If you post something on your Facebook page and someone comments on it, be sure to respond! You need to show that you want to hear from them and that you are not using social media as just a one way communications platform. Social media can be used to gain meaningful insights from your audience. Use it to your advantage and keep up the engagement!
If you follow these three rules, you are on your way to becoming a social media expert. The truth is, social media can be a huge gift for your brand when you employ it correctly. Just think of the possibilities: past, current, and future clients are ready to hear what you have to say. It’s a marketer’s dream!
So what are you waiting for? Get on it!
Do you have a favorite social media tip? Tweet us about it at @wdgtweet!
