Dos and Don’ts of Social Media for Businesses

The Dos and Don’ts of social media for businesses are fairly simple when it comes down to it. However, even though the guidelines are apparently straightforward, there is oftentimes room for crossing boundaries and committing social media no-nos.

This info-graphic outlines the specific Dos and Don’ts associated with social media for marketing your business or brand. What you DO want to do is have a plan for your image. How do you want social media to reflect what you want to convey? Create measurable goals for yourself, and reach them with engaging content that creates conversation and encourages your audience to share it to expand and build your network. More than anything, be a good listener so that you can relate to your audience and better understand how your business or brand can improve to meet its target market’s needs.

DON’T be selfish on social media. Always remember to thank your followers who actively participate with your brand’s posts, and don’t use generic marketing techniques or be pushy while trying to attain your goals.

Follow this simple advice and social media will be the best thing to happen to your business’ marketing strategy!

One way to ensure that you stay on top of your goals and that your social media is on track is to commit to compiling a monthly report that analyses your brand or business’ improvements from the prior month, what you did and will continue to work on, and your objectives for the upcoming month. The easiest way to do this is to decide what you want your monthly report will include, create a basic format on PowerPoint, and then simply update it each month and save it as  PDF so that you can easily send it to other people in your team.

Shown below is an example of the content of a monthly report that I put together for two brands that I represent, Republic Tequila and Republic Spirit Blends. Simply click through the slides to enlarge:

 

 

A Day in the Life of a Marketing Coordinator

As a visual learner, it always helps to see something explained rather than just read or hear about it. Since the objective of this blog is to enlighten and guide social media laggards, I invite you to take a look at a day in the life of a marketing coordinator, as told by yours truly.

This slideshow represents a snapshot of what a typical day at work might include for someone like me, whose job is to learn brand identity and share it across social media to create conversation around the product. Of course, every day is different, but much of what you will see, from brand analysis to social media planning, plays a part in my daily work duties and activities to at least some degree.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I am currently working on one of the brands that Raze Media represents, Republic Spirit Blends. Enjoy!

4 Fail-Safe Ways to Jump-Start Your Business

Understand your audiences and lead them to the same place: your other social media outlets, your website, and subsequently your business.

Send out newsletters to remind your audience who you are and update them on what you’re doing.

Create or use popular hashtags to correspond with days of the week. For Republic Tequila, #TequilaTuesday is one of our most popular day of the week hashtags.

Create a relationship with your audience and invite them to interact and participate.

1. Capitalize on Communities

Use social media to converge your different audiences from social media to the same location: your website and subsequently, your business. Promote new products on sites such as Pinterest, and use different language for different social media outlets. It is important to understand the demographics of social media to better target your audience(s).

2. Send out Newsletters

Newsletters are an important component of reaching out to your business’ community to remind your audience who you are and update them on what you’ve been doing. Business can also utilize newsletters to sell a product or service, and recent studies showed that last year, 44% of email recipients made at least one purchase in connection to a promotional email. If your business frequently updates inventory or products, a one to two times a week is a good rate to send newsletters. However, if the purpose of your business’ newsletter is more update-focused and your service stays relatively the same, twice a month to once a month is sufficient. Remember that too many emails can bog down your reader: many recipients will delete the newsletter without reading it if they are sent too frequently. Instead, make them poignant and enticing, and use social media for your constant updates.

3. Create a Recurring Day or Event for your Business and HASHTAG Away

Hashtags are a great tool for finding trending topics and drawing attention to your posts. Make sure to understand the importance of hashtags, then designate either already popular hashtags to specific days or make your own new ones to focus on. For example, as the Marketing Coordinator for Republic Tequila, I use #MargaritaMonday and #TequilaTuesday as some of my recurring day hashtags.

4. Invite customer feedback & build relationships with your audience

If audience feels respected and noticed, they will feel a connection to your business or brand and be more likely to invest in your service or product. Take a look at how Fireball Whiskey interacts with its audience on Facebook. This company makes its marketing about the individual rather than the product to build real relationships, and it’s worked. Only on the market in the US since 2007, Fireball Whiskey has grown to represent 7% dollar share for its customers.

Follow these four simple but effective steps, and your business will be propelled to new heights.

Posting Strategically: Schedule your Posts

Facebook allows the user to view and edit all scheduled posts.

In this day and age, marketing via social media networks is essential to practically every business in any industry’s success. However, for companies that do not regularly deal with social media in day-to-day practices, this component can understandably add a level of stress and anxiety when a business realizes the necessity of posting to various platforms on a regular basis.

Luckily, mainstream social media mediums have developed easy-to-use methods that minimize this preemptive concern of integrating the time it takes to generate posts and publicize them into daily to-do lists.

In my internship at Raze Media in Downtown Dallas as the Marketing Coordinator for our top clients Republic Tequila and Republic Spirit Blends, I have found scheduled posts to be my savior. For me, Facebook’s scheduled posts in particular have proven to be the easiest and most efficient to utilize.

Simply fill out your post as you normally would were you to post immediately. Before publicizing it, however, select the clock icon under your post to select the date and time you would like to schedule the post for. You can find a step-by-step guide on scheduling posts to Facebook here.

Before you begin to schedule your posts, however, it is important to observe the best and worst times to post to social media. Entrepreneur.com provides a simplified report detailing the times at which your posts will reach the largest audience.

(©2014 Avery Stefan)

View another info-graphic here.

Scheduling posts allows you to easily access and edit pre-scheduled posts, from content to the date and time that each individual post will be publicized. There is no limit on how far in advance you can post, which means that you can plan ahead for weeks during which you know you will be preoccupied or for holidays and special promotions and schedule all of your social media posts so that you have one less thing to worry about when the time comes. 

Most social media platforms will also provide an option to link posts to other outlets as well so that you only have to post on one platform and it will be shared across the board. Of course, you might want to shorten posts for Twitter, but in a crunch, any post would be better than none at all! After all, you wouldn’t want your audience to forget about you. With this backup in mind, supplemental posts will be all you will need to concern yourself with.