Social media tips for the socially-media awkward.
Social media. Love it, hate it, or spend all day scrolling through it while kind of secretly hating it, you can’t live without it. At its best, it’s a way to bring people together and a handy way to advertise on the cheap. At its worst, it’s how your company made the news under headlines like “Social Media Gaffe Goes Viral.” To avoid that from happening and avoid wasting your time, get to know the platforms you’re using and make smart choices about how you plan to use them. After all, social media is just a tool, and posting on it is a skill you can build.
Know Your Platform
Different social media sites lend themselves to different content. It’s not just a question of format but also style. A video posted to YouTube may be longer and more informative, while users browsing TikTok will expect to see a dance or a comedy bit. You don’t have to choose just one platform. Many dealers have a presence on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and more. But know that you’ll be reaching a different audience with each. Even if a person has an account on multiple sites, they expect to see different content on each platform. Everything varies by region, but generally, if you’re trying to reach an audience of potential business clients, use LinkedIn. Current customers who may want an easy way to connect with you will appreciate you having a Twitter account. Facebook is best for reaching your local community to talk about your company’s charity work, outreach, and services.
Be Realistic About Content Creation
Larger companies may have a full-time social media manager, but most dealers have someone in marketing or PR oversee social media accounts. If you’re a small business, don’t compare your social media presence to the slick campaigns produced by bigger companies. Most companies will be much better served by simply posting content they generate naturally, like photos of their staff, video demos of products, or posts detailing the latest company news, rather than producing extra marketing content specifically for social media. Remember that it’s more of a communication tool, a way for your clients and community to get a sense of who your company is and how to contact you, rather than a pure advertising platform.
Post Consistently
Conventional wisdom says anyone running any social media account should try to post once a day. For many business accounts, that’s excessive. Once a week or even once a month can be plenty, depending on the content. The main thing is to be consistent about whatever content schedule you do set. Don’t be shy. Tell your audience what to expect from you and when to expect it. You can shape your calendar around the real world, holidays or weeks, or around major manufacturer product releases. You have the freedom to set whatever schedule you want. Try something like #TroubleshootingTuesdays, where you post about problems you saw and how you solved them. Spotlight a team member every Friday. Decide on a few categories of content and then post in that category at the same time every week.
Set Useful Goals
Of course, everybody wants their social media accounts to be popular. It can be disheartening to put up a well-crafted post and watch it pull in dismal numbers. Remember that social media isn’t what your dealership does. It is just a tool you use to tell the world what your dealership does. Organic growth is best. Trying too hard to get new followers can make your content seem fake, and it’s a distraction to the real goals you should have as a dealership. Remember that different posts can have different goals even on the same platform. Compare the success of similar posts. Did more people click to watch a product demo than the last time you posted one? That’s growth, even if your follower count didn’t change.
An account with a few hundred followers who always look forward to and engage with your company’s content is much more valuable than an account with thousands of followers who ignore it. Don’t chase a bigger number just because it’s bigger. Quality is much more important than quantity in social media.
Think About SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a gigantic topic, and something people spend entire careers mastering. It can also be a frustrating black box, with every social media site using its own complex formulas to choose which posts show up on a user’s feed and in what order.
SEO consultants are available for companies that want to make deep dives, but that effort may be better saved for improving your company’s website rankings in Google search. For social media, just focus on a few broad concepts. Pick account names that are unique and logically connected to your company. If your company’s name is too long or not available as an account name, think local. A dealership in Austin will be better served by an account name that mentions the city, rather than just “Texas” or “LoneStar.”
Be search-friendly, meaning use unique, specific, local keywords when you can, in both titles and descriptions. All social media sites have their own internal search functions, and anyone searching for you wants to find you, so make it easy for them. Make use of image captions, location tagging, anything that gives the social media site more information to help people find you.
Try Not to Feel Like Advertising
You’re a business, and these social media accounts are promoting your business, so in a way, all of your content will be advertising. And it should be! But people naturally avoid content that feels like advertising, which is a common pitfall of many posts made by business accounts. Have something to say besides, “Here is our product and/or service, please buy it.” A company is a group of people pursuing a shared goal, so let your followers see that. Celebrate your wins, your people, and your community. Stay loose. Post images or videos of puppies now and then. Everybody loves puppies.
That doesn’t mean you have to be shy about what you’re trying to accomplish on social media. When you have significant content planned, make the most of it. Tease it by posting a few days or weeks ahead of time. Tell your followers when to tune in for a big video launch or an interactive event. Promote content from one platform across all of your other social channels. Just don’t make people dig for it. Tell them your other account names, and link directly to the content you want them to see. Show off your company with pride.
An Appeal from a Millennial
There’s no right way to use social media, but there are wrong ways to use social media, and they’ll make your content invisible to the “digital native” generations. One of the best things about social media is that each userbase develops its own style of communication, but one of the trickiest things is that style can’t be faked.
Resist the temptation to be too “internet.” Tone down the emoji use. One per post is plenty, and none is even better. A lot of businesses on social media mistakenly believe that emojis are meant to replace words. Instead of the word “car” they use a picture of a car, and then they notice how many other words can be replaced by an emoji, and the post starts to look like a puzzle on the back of a kid’s menu.
The same applies to hashtags, tagging accounts, hopping on trending topic bandwagons, and the dreaded “sassy” brand voice. Don’t chase viral fame. It’s impossible to do on purpose, and you’ll look ridiculous trying. Brand accounts don’t need to be cool; they just need to be useful, informative, interesting, and showcase your strengths. Be honest with yourself. When people are looking for hot pop culture takes, they don’t turn to their local office technology supplier.
Hashtags are especially tempting to brand accounts since they look like an easy way to increase your post’s reach, but you need to understand how hashtags work. Far too many businesses treat them as keywords, tagging every noun and verb in the post and making it unreadable. Hashtags are more like subscriptions. People follow or search a particular hashtag to see what has been posted on that topic. This means that only very specific hashtags are actually used. #[YourCityName]Entrepreneurs is great, #printer, not so much.
Search every hashtag before using it. Does the content that comes up fit with what you’re planning to post? Does it seem specific enough? Would these feel like useful results if you were searching this topic? If the answer is no, leave the hashtag off. And never use more than two, max. The last thing you want is for someone to see your post and skip right over it because it looked like #spam.
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