Getting Started
When starting out on social media, it’s important to create a routine for yourself so that you can enjoy the process, maintain your efforts, and achieve what you’d hoped for.
Break down your goals and what you truly want to achieve on social media. Along with this, perform an audit of your online presence, look at how you appear on search engines and evaluate existing social media accounts. Get an understanding of which social media platforms would best suit your needs. It is important to recognize that platforms are popular among certain audiences. For example, TikTok, an application for sharing short videos, tends to cater to young adults and teenagers, with 27% of its users between 13-17 years old and its largest age demographic at 42% being young adults. This would give brands targeting a young adult audience, such as a youth clothing company or video game company, a better stance than, say, Pinterest, which has mostly female users between the ages of 25-50. As another example, a company that focuses on providing services for other businesses or one that does a lot of recruiting, such as a digital marketing company, a public relations company or a financial institute, would highly benefit from platforms such as LinkedIn, since LinkedIn is based specifically on creating business and professional connections. A company that sells products or goods may find a photo based app like Facebook or Instagram more beneficial for sharing their products than LinkedIn or Twitter, which rely heavily on text based or linked content.
Setting Intention
Put together Social Media Governance Documents to help guide your brand to stay consistent and on topic throughout your social media accounts. These documents help to keep brands and team members on the same page for sharing and creating content.
These documents can include:
- Social Media Guidelines
- Provides simple Do’s and Don’ts for your team or employees when they use social media
- Social Media Style Guide
- Highlights the importance of establishing a voice and tone for your brand
- Social Media Policy
- Establishes the general usage of the brand’s social media accounts for those publishing and engaging on behalf of the brand, as well as how certain topics or issues are handled when they arise
- Social Media Plan
- Outlines the overarching goals, unique campaigns, recommended social platforms, the types of content that will be posted, and the posting frequency.
Creating Content
A crucial piece of maintaining a consistent theme and posting schedule across all platforms is planning and creating your content. Having content for your audience is incredibly beneficial, providing your audience with insight into your brand, product, or services. For this process, try creating content calendars which act as a starting point for what you intend to post over the next month. These calendars can always be subject to change, however, having a content plan makes life much easier!
- Existing Materials
- After you’ve established your goals for social media, performed an online audit, and determined where your audience lives on social media, and set up your guidelines, take a look at your current materials brand documents, such as including your logo, style guide, photos, videos, etc. What can you leverage for social media? What else needs to be created?
Once you’ve established a general idea for the content you’d like to publish over the next month, get to work on creating it. This can be done a number of ways:
- Hiring a professional photographer and videographer for your brand to capture content
- Host DIY ‘content creation days’ with your team to collect the content you need
- Leverage digital applications available online to create content
- Generate content through conducting interviews, investigating a topic, or writing on key topics that interest your audience
- Copywriting or ad design
- This will require the creation of graphics and posts specific to the platform in which you are interested in creating an advertisement on
Putting the Social in Social Media
The most important part of social media is being social – connecting with others, sharing, learning from one another, and building community.
Engage with your audience by liking, commenting and sharing their content, especially user generate content- content your audience has created showcasing your services or products. Another method to encouraging engagement is asking your audience questions and providing answers to questions asked.
Engaging with your audience allow you to build deeper connections with potential clients or customers. It also helps to build brand awareness and improve your brand’s reputation.
Checking in on Your Goals
In order to monitor your progress towards your social media goals, outline specific metrics that you want to achieve that connect to your goals. Try running regular reports to see how you are doing, what’s going well, and what you can do better.
Getting started on social media is an exciting journey with loads of benefits.
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