You’ve been posting on social media and feeling great about what you’ve done. But are you getting the responses or engagement you were expecting?
Below are some quick checkpoints to see if your social media is set up for success.
1. Are you responding to comments in a timely manner?
It’s fantastic to be able to post regularly on social media, but are you watching for comments? The entire point of social media is to connect and engage with your audience, and quite often I see social media accounts that are posting regularly, but the comments section is left to its own devices. Questions are left unanswered, which is a major lost opportunity for the business.
Solution: Watch for comments at least once a day and respond. Some require a typed response, some can be simply ‘liked’ to show you’ve seen the comment.
2. Are you making too many promotional posts?
Being too ‘salesy’ on social media is a common mistake. Your audience doesn’t typically connect with you to be sold to, they’re usually connecting to learn more about your business and who is behind it before making a purchase decision.
Social media is like dating–you’d never meet someone and ask him/her to marry you on the first date. You need to court, get to know each other, and then when the time is right, ask for the sale.
Solution: What works very well on social media is to follow the 80/20 rule–80% of the time post things that are helpful but not related to a sale in any way, 20% of the time you can post about your product or service directly.
3. Are you ignoring or deleting negative comments?
It is an unfortunate reality in business–at some point a customer will feel like his/her experience wasn’t what was expected, and a nasty comment can happen on your social media. Do not delete it or ignore it.
Solution: Use it as an opportunity to show this customer and all of your potential customers how you handle it when things go wrong. If there is any doubt in those thinking of making a purchase, they may see your response and feel comfortable enough to take the plunge. It shows you are authentic and care about your customer experience, and the value of that is infinite.
4. Are you posting the same thing to multiple social networks?
I realize that many businesses don’t have time to manage social media on multiple networks, and it seems like an easy solution to duplicate the same thing across Facebook, Instagram, etc. The problem with this is all social networks have a different purpose, a different culture. What works on one network may not work on another, and you’re essentially wasting your valuable time on something that isn’t going to give you results.
Solution: Assess which networks you absolutely need to be on–in other words, find where your customers are spending their time and stick with that. If you find a vast majority of them are on Instagram, spend your time and efforts there for now. There is no rule saying you need to be everywhere. It doesn’t end up being a smart use of your time to post on Facebook if your customers are elsewhere.
5. Are you being authentic?
Being human on social media is imperative. Your audience won’t connect with a robot who just churns out posts about your product or service and makes no attempt to connect with its human followers. It’s ok–and encouraged–to be real on social media.
Idea: Showing what’s going on behind the scenes in your business is a fantastic way to show that your product or service has value. It also shows there are humans behind the business and those are far more interesting to connect with than robots.
These tips are a great start to improving your social media feeds and your connection to your audience. It’s also ok to start small, focus on quality content on your social networks, and only put out what you can manage. It is better to offer quality content less often and make strong connections with your followers than to “spray and pray” as they say.
