Today I had the opportunity to sit down with our founder, Ellie MacDonald, who gave me some top tips on how to create an effective social media strategy.
Since interning at MacComms, I have had the privilege to assist with a number of the companies’ social media marketing strategies and observe colleague’s work with clients. To name a few, since the new year MacComms have developed and executed the following social media solutions:
- The Rock Burger Kitchen’s re-branding and exclusive VIP night relaunch night.
• The publicity of a community interest company offering free support to businesses, HD Biz Works
• Social media training of an interactive training,development and creative communications company
• Obtaining over 50,000 signatures in a local government campaign #HandsOffHRI
• MacComms’ very own first business birthday, #MacCelebration
Throughout my time of student work experience at MacComms, it’s clear to see that Ellie and her employees really know how to use social media to communicate and attract business to their 2,000+ followers across various social media platforms.
Retracting back to my social media session with Ellie, here are some of the key social-media objectives that she outlined:
Principles of Social Media
- Since 2015 2.1 billion people in the world have social media, if you’re a business not currently using social media this could be a massive gap in your marketing strategy to communicate to potential and existing customers and/or clients.
- It’s necessary to understand how to construct and monitor your posts on your targeted platforms and to create and monitor engagement.
What social media sites to target?
It depends on the business as to which channel(s) a business needs to invest its time in, the key social media platforms which MacComms has worked with in 2016 are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram and Google+.
It’s vital to understand the difference of each social media site and so to adjust your tone of voice, content and even what time of day to communicate through each channel is key to maximise your efforts.
But without getting too in-depth it is important to understand the basics.
For example, the basics of a Twitter account are:
- Composing a successful Tweet
• The importance Re-Tweets and Quoting Tweets, to remain active with your customers and/or
• Best dates/times to post
• Hashtags and trending topics
• Hashtag hours
• Sharing & Engaging
• Building engagement with links & tone of voice
• Twitter lists
Understanding your social media strategy
When operating social media, it is important to remain active. Ellie suggests that for Twitter you should be posting at least five times a day, at least twice on Facebook and once a week on LinkedIn. And whilst social media management tools such as Hootsuite exist to manage time effectively, it is important to manage as-it-happens content and not just broadcast posts, in order to build interactivity with your audience.
Ellie emphasised the importance of social media varying dependent upon the business. The key factors to consider are your sector, audience and platform. For example, if your business is especially visual, your key platforms should be Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook, whilst a corporate B2B company ought to focus more on LinkedIn and Twitter.
And when plotting objectives as part of a social media strategy, they should always be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound, this way your social media management will be the most effective and will produce the greatest results.
Measuring the effectiveness
In relation to your SMART objectives, it’s crucial that social media management is measured to evaluate your success.
Multi-channel attribution is essential here, so understanding the importance of using reporting features available in Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Hootsuite Analytics and tracking of URL shorteners is necessary.
Thanks Ellie for your one-on-one social media training today! If you want help with your social media marketing, I recommend contacting the team at MacComms.
By Jahnae Gumbs, former student intern at MacComms.
