How to manage your social media when your business is closed
Whether it’s in the evening or at the weekend; it is still important to make sure your social media accounts are active if you are out of the office on business or on holiday.
Whilst it might be a challenge, utilising your social profiles outside of work hours can provide the perfect opportunity to help boost your business and give your brand the coverage it needs to a range of new audiences that might not engage during the nine to five.
With this in mind, here are some top tips on how you can help increase social when you are away from your desk.
Scheduling Content
Social media doesn’t switch off the same time as your computer, it is a constant force that is active 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days of the year. This means that it is important to keep your audience entertained in the evenings and at weekends when most people are likely to be engaging.
You can keep your accounts updated without even logging into them every day by using scheduling tools such as TweetDeck, Hootsuite or Buffer. These are great apps for sending tweets and posts at times of the day when you are not at the office, when average levels of social media use are at their peak.
You might also want to consider using a plugin such as IFTTT (If This Then That) as this will automatically send stories and updates from relevant websites directly to your social media profiles, or queue them up on your Buffer schedule to be tweeted out.
How much should you be posting?
Make sure you remember the 80/20 rule when posting as no one wants a constant stream of updates from your brand – this can become annoying and is almost guaranteed to lose you followers. 80% of your updates should be articles, pictures and information related to your industry and the other 20% should be focused on the brand. For example if you are a dentist, 80% of updates should be about dental related topics such as toothbrushes, teeth whitening and the other 20% can be about events happening in the practice’s area.
Always make sure you plan ahead
Have you ever heard of the saying “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”?
To prevent this from happening your social media plan needs to carefully planned and executed. This works best by getting all members of your team together either on a monthly or quarterly basis to discuss upcoming projects, themes and topics which you’ll be updating your social accounts. Many businesses fail to plan properly due to being too busy, however, the best ideas often come from group discussions rather than just one person from the team.
Produce a content calendar
A New Year has arrived, so why not get organised by producing an all singing and dancing content calendar. This will help the whole team keep up-to-date with everything and it will allow you to lay out what needs to be posted and when. By covering themes and topics in advance, this will prevent any confusion with team members and clients and you can agree this with your clients before anything goes live.
Make sure that you keep your posts relevant to the audience, timely and helpful, and your brand should succeed on social. Share some of your social tips with us over on our Facebook page?
