A successful social media presence can help elevate and spread awareness of your brand to new potential customers and keep your customers and stakeholders connected to you. It is a powerful tool to have in your communications tool kit.
However, developing engaging social media content involves so much more than just coming up with informative and witty words. It takes thoughtfulness, research and personalization. Knowing the rules and successful strategy is key to increasing your following, engagement numbers and impressions.
While mastering the nuances to each social media platform can be a little intimidating at first, with a few guidelines, you’ll be a social media maven in no time.
Step 1: Mind the Word Count
If you have several social channels to draft copy for, remember each platform has its own word count. For example, a post to Facebook (which has a max of character limit of more than 63,200 characters) will be much longer than a post to Twitter (which has a word count of only 280 characters).
Step 2: Research Hashtags and Handles
Look for relevant hashtags to accompany your social posts. This is especially helpful for awareness day posts.
Researching hashtags not only provides insight into the social conversation taking place around these posts, but also helps you stay mindful of word counts so you can plan how long your suggested copy can be.
If you are including another organization or thought leader in your copy, you will also need to identify the correct social handles/accounts they use for each platform. Keep in mind that these handles will also affect your word count.
Step 3: Identify the Appropriate Voice and Content
Each social platform serves a different purpose and audience. Therefore, the suggested voice and drafted content will need to differ slightly. For example, a post to LinkedIn will need to sound more professional and feature more talent-oriented content, than a post to Instagram.
You will also likely find that a post to one platform does not necessarily need to be shared on another. For example, a link to a news article is appropriate for Twitter, but users on Instagram will be less interested.
Step 4: Pair Your Post with the Right Imagery
The next step is procuring imagery and designing graphics. While visuals are not required to post on most many social platforms, they are tied to higher social engagement. According to Twitter, photos average a 35% boost in retweets and videos get a 28% boost over tweets with no corresponding imagery. Provided you have the bandwidth, we absolutely recommend sharing a photo, video or GIF.
Organizational photos, like a shot of a team outing, behind-the-scenes photo or of event coverage, will perform better on social media than stock images and infographics in most cases. The good news is that a professional photographer, while a nice-to-have, is not a must-have.
In our experience, we find that employee or volunteer submitted photos taken on their phones perform well on social media. If you cannot be there on-site to document the event, then we recommend encouraging employees and volunteers to submit imagery.
Stock imagery is also an option if you’re unable to share photos from your organizations. Sites like Canva, Pexels and Pixabay offer free images, and Shutterstock has great high-quality images for purchase that you can use.
If you do opt for stock imagery, please read the fine print for each image, especially if the image is free. Some images are not licensed for commercial use, require photo credit or stipulate restrictions on the type of content they can be used for.
Step 4: Resize Your Visuals
As with the copy, image sizes/limits differ on each social media platform and within features (stories v. posts). It’s important to have the photo or graphic re-sized and fitted for each social platform. Otherwise, your graphic will get cut off. This is especially noticeable if your graphic has words. (Please find the latest guidelines for social media image sizes here.)
These tips are foundational in managing your social media presence and can help prevent mistakes that may keep users from engaging with you online. They are key to growing your metrics and sharing your message with a larger audience.
Interested in reading about how to plan your social media calendar? Read our blog post addressing this topic here. For more tips and tricks about social media and how you can elevate your brand, please follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
