It’s a cluttered world out there with all the messaging, brands, platforms, retweets, posts, content, influencers, videos, and, well, you name it and consumers’ endless scrolling and infinite content streams leave little room for error when creating your brand’s story.
You and your team – or even just you! – can create a stellar social media marketing plan by following a few important guidelines that can streamline your social media workload, reach your desired audience, and create an online presence that will support your business goals.
Here are our top 5 tips for your social media marketing:
- Choose the platform that best fits your business. Take a good, long look at your brand, your audience, and your goals and find the right platform for you. Do you run a business aimed at the 60+ set? TikTok probably isn’t the place to promote your brand. Is your business about all play and no work? Skip over LinkedIn as it’s best left to career-oriented, older users like members of the Baby Boomers and Gen X. Baby Boomers also boom on Facebook while Gen Z reigns on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok (and uses 2-3 platforms daily!). Millennials and Gen X use 5-6 platforms at least weekly including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. In short, define your audience and go where they are.
- Branding. Just like your website, your packaging, and anything else you produce as part of your business, your social media streams should look and feel like your brand. That means keeping colors, font, and tone the same from one place to the next and working in your logo where appropriate so users know that it’s you. You can engage the services of a designer to help plan your social media look and feel and use an online design site like Canva to crank out your content once you’ve established your direction.
- Create a calendar – and stick to it. Social media posts may seem ad hoc but the best, most coherent social media streams are planned well in advance with business priorities, national holidays, and even silly events in mind. (There’s a reason we’re all celebrating things like National Taco Day!) Create a social media calendar with content that will show your audience that you’re with it enough to join in the conversation and that you can put your own spin on things. Posting once a day, or even every other day, lets people know that there’s a real, live person dedicated to the success of your business and allows you to connect with potential customers in ways you couldn’t before. There are plenty of social media scheduling services out there like Hootsuite that will allow you to schedule posts in advance so you don’t have to be glued to your device at posting time.
- Content. Good content has the ability to grab a user’s attention right from the start. But what are you showing a user once you’ve got them? Be genuine in what you share on your social media stream. Show off work you’re proud of but also share your human side. Open up about what prompted you to start your business. Got a new puppy? Share that too! When all else fails, think to yourself: would this stop me from scrolling and make me want to engage with this brand?
- When less is better. Images, video, and graphics rule on social media while text-heavy (or, heaven forbid, text-only) posts get very little attention. Keep this in mind when laying out your content calendar: less is better when it comes to text. At J2 Design NYC, we recommend no more than 3-5 hashtags per post plus just a few sentences per caption. Your audience should never have to click more to read. That action, however small, just begs a user to keep on scrolling and loses their very precious attention.
Need additional help planning your social media marketing for the upcoming year? Reach out! We’d love to help your brand grow.
