Whether you’re a small business trying to reach new customers, or a large brand keeping up your presence online, managing social media accounts is a big task.
Due to the ever-changing landscape of social media, it can be difficult to stay on track across all platforms. So we asked the people who do it for a living for their top social media marketing tips. As a social media manager, you need to deliver highly tailored and unique content every day, whilst juggling a huge range of brands and clients from different industries.
These are the people in the know, and here are their top social media marketing tips in our first Hopper HQ expert round-up…
“I am the Head of Social here at CUE Marketing. My day-to-day work includes managing my team, building and delivering social strategies, creating content & campaign creation and management (both organic and paid social) for a variety of clients such as Masons Restaurant Bar, Manchester Hall, Ikon furniture & more. Most of our clients are based in the North West of England, with a strong focus in the hospitality and F&B industry. Our team have extensive experience in the set industry & we pride ourselves in delivering fantastic results for all our clients!”
Social Media Marketing Tips:
⭐ Integrate yourself into your clients internal team – this will allow you to create the best content, come up with the best ideas, and provide them with the best results.
⭐ Always put yourself in your clients’ shoes – this way you can relate to their concerns; especially if they lack experience in social media themselves.
⭐ Plan ahead – our team plans organic content one month ahead, always considering any last minute (ad hoc) requests and/or events that may occur.
⭐ Keep optimising – when launching a paid campaign, don’t assume one target audience will do the trick. Keep optimising your message, image or video and test different audiences until you achieve the result you want!
Twitter 🐦 @cue_marketing
Instagram 📸 @cuemarketing
'Always put yourself in your clients' shoes' - Rafi of @CUE_Marketing shares his top social media management tactics! Click To Tweet
“Working at Sunshine Communications, I basically act as the agency’s social media guardian! This involves keeping up with the latest trends and changes in the social media spectrum, thinking strategically and guiding our brands through the relevant platforms and representing their social media presence. My favourite social media platform really is a no brainer for me – Instagram. This is probably due to the fact that I come from a TV background, so I tend to class myself as a visual-thinker. I’m also Sunshine’s dedicated Community Manager, from responding to customer queries and engagements to social media listening in order to identify new audiences and opportunities for our clients.“
Social Media Marketing Tips:
⭐ Strive to treat each social media platform differently. The primary mediums we focus on are Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and each of them have different functionalities you can utilise for brands. For example, Facebook is now focusing on the people, and this involves prioritising comments on posts over any other form of engagement. After the recent changes to the platform, we had to liaise with our content team to come up with new strands that will encourage the audiences to comment on posts and drive conversation.
⭐ Twitter is a conversational platform first and foremost, and shouldn’t always be so polished – i.e. attaching an asset to every single tweet. For our clients, we conduct social media listening through our followers and keyword searches, we partake in Twitter Chats to drive brand awareness and we use functionalities such as Twitter Polls to collect data on the followers.
⭐ As for my favourite platform, Instagram, visually-striking imagery is key. Statistics have shown that users pay attention to the visual first, and tend to not even read the caption. We also research hashtags thoroughly in order to reach a relevant audience and increase the level of engagement.
Twitter 🐦 @kellyannbean
Instagram 📸 @kellyannbean
'Strive to treat each social media platform differently' - @sunshinecomms Social Media Manager @kellyannbean shares her top tips! Read more Click To Tweet
“I’m a Senior Social Media Manager at Giant Noise — an entertainment, hospitality, and lifestyle public relations and social media firm — with a background in paid social strategy and strategic planning! I attended Texas State University and earned my BA in Advertising and my MA in Integrated Marketing Communications. From there I went on to work with clients like AMD, Shell, Texas Tourism, National Domestic Violence Hotline, Olive Garden, Texas Disposal Systems, and Red McCombs Property Group at Edelman and White Hat Agency. I’ve experience working with a wide range of clients from local to national including tech, B2B, CPGs, real estate, F&B, and more. With offices in Austin, San Antonio, and New York, Giant Noise has made its name on building creative and engaging public relations and social media campaigns that result in high-caliber exposure for our clients.”
Social Media Marketing Tips:
⭐ Use the 4:5 aspect ratio on Instagram – using this image ratio makes your post dominate the feed. It also stands out amongst horizontal images that are posted by most users. It’s important to shoot your images with this cropping ratio in mind. Don’t crop in-camera because you will have to trim the image and might be trimming out important elements.
⭐ If you are going to be on social media, commit – if you’re going to have social channels, make sure to maintain them and post consistently. Nothing is worse than visiting a business’ social channels and seeing that they aren’t committed to posting regularly or promoting themselves. This creates a “red flag” in the consumers mind. Make sure you always have your business bio updated, check links, and post consistently.
⭐ Have a personality – build out your social media to really make your business’ personality shine. Determine your aesthetic, voice, and tone. You’ve spent time crafting and fine-tuning your brand’s personality and social media is the perfect place to show it off. Are you irreverent? Fun? Serious and informative? Make sure your social media reflects your brand’s personality.
⭐ Prioritize where you allocate your time on social – not all platforms are going to align with your objectives. Focus on the platforms that you see the most return on your investment. Some of our clients are focusing more on Instagram and deactivating their Twitter accounts since their brands are visually driven. If you aren’t a consumer driven product then you may focus more on Facebook and Twitter and not on Instagram. You don’t have to be on every platform, you need to be on the RIGHT platforms.
Twitter 🐦 @giantnoise
Instagram 📸 @giantnoise
Top Instagram tactic from the pros: use the 4:5 aspect ratio on Instagram! Read more of Cody from @giantnoise's tips here! Click To Tweet
“I work as Social Media Manager at Liquid PR, a full-service multi-award winning PR, design, social and content agency based in Birmingham, London and the Channel Islands. I work across an array of client accounts, primarily in the food and education sectors, creating and implimenting social media strategies, auditing channels and analysing data, running paid social campaigns, managing and growing communities, and also producing visual social assets such as photography, gifs, graphics and videos. I also run regular workshops with clients to help them better their in-house understanding of social media.”
Social Media Marketing Tips:
⭐ One size does not fit all when it comes to social media. At Liquid I work with hospitality clients whose audience do not work the standard 9-5 shift, with this in mind peak time for a social post could be 1am or 5am – it all varies depending on the client and their audience.
⭐ Engage in genuine conversation with your audience and they’ll reward you with engagement back.
⭐ Quality of social content is important, however so is the immediacy and context of social media and the unique nature of each platform. With a never ending stream of social content it can be difficult to find a gap in the marketplace to own, especially as users are more likely to engage with content from their phones in the present moment rather than historic content. You should always seek to make innovative content such as live video, and be amongst the pioneers to utilise chatbots and augmented reality technology.
⭐ Make good use of social media analytics. Often people can be led by personal preference and emotional attachment when it comes to making content decisions, however all decisions should be made with the data in mind. Numbers don’t lie!
Twitter 🐦 @helloshaunni
Instagram 📸 @helloshaunni
'Engage in genuine conversation with your audience' says @helloshaunni of @liquidpr - read more social media tactics from the professionals here! Click To Tweet
“As an Account Manager at Digirank I work across the entire digital marketing spectrum as well as heading up our social media offering. I’m really lucky to work with a wide range of clients; from motorcycle clothing and luxury flooring retailers to conference venues and damp proofing experts. My favourite part of the job is helping transform a company’s online presence, especially on the social channels. I couldn’t pick a favourite channel – they’re all great in their own way – but I have really enjoyed utilising paid Facebook strategies.”
Social Media Marketing Tips:
⭐ Drill down into your insights. Look at the insights for each of your social media channels separately and ask yourself the following:
> What time do your posts get the most engagement? When are most of your audience online? This will help you build a plan of what time you should be posting on each channel.
> What content format does your audience engage with most? This will help you to decide whether to post more images, video, infographics, long-form content etc.
> Which of your content is being shared most socially? This will help you identify the type of posts that your audience want to see more of.
Remember, your audience acts differently on each channel so ensure you run this for each channel separately!
⭐ Build a community. To build a genuine community, you need to engage with your audience. Social media is no longer about just pushing out your brands message; conversations need to be two-way. Ensure that you reply to comments, interact with your audience in a real way and listen to them. Share relevant content from complimentary accounts that enriches their experience on your channel.
⭐ Repurpose content. So much time is dedicated to creating engaging, search-driven blog content. Give older content a new lease of life by reframing the piece for social and pushing it out on your social accounts multiple times. This gives you lots of great content to post but also builds exposure as more of your target audience see it.
Twitter 🐦 @digirank
Instagram 📸 @digirank
'Drill down into your social media insights' - read more of Vicky's top tips from her time managing social media accounts @digirank Click To Tweet
“I am the Content Marketing Manager at Flow Digital, and also the voice behind two social media platforms. My day-to-day life at Flow sees me crafting content marketing strategies for clients, implementing and, subsequently, measuring the success of the campaigns. A large number of our clients are from diverse industries, so I can be tweeting about the latest insights in the direct mail sector and creating content on company liquidation by the next house. We have a strong focus on establishing a voice, which we spread across all clients.”
Social Media Marketing Tips:
⭐ Have a voice. In a world where there are over 3 billion social media users, your company needs to put in a lot of work to stand out. A hint of personality can go a long way toward building your audience and relationships within the industry. My tone – for both the company and client Twitter profiles – are informal and approachable. When it comes to sharing news regarding an industry that is not a cat playing piano, you need to draw people in – a casual and friendly tone will do just that.
⭐ Don’t oversell your brand. Of course, you need to promote your brand on your profiles, but doing so as a priority can see you look spammy. For instance, a Facebook page posting blog after blog to the site – with little else – can see your organic reach drop. The fewer people interacting with your previous posts, the less likely Facebook is to show it to more. Your audience will begin to drop. Therefore, share pictures and videos behind-the-scenes to show a face behind the page, interspersed with your latest articles. You wouldn’t walk up to someone and demand they visit your page, so why do it online.
⭐ Social media platforms are different. I’ve seen a LOT of bad examples in the past with brands linking up their Twitter and Facebook posts and, subsequently, lowering their engagement. As mentioned above, the less interaction your Facebook posts get, the less likely FB is to show your latest posts to more. Each social media platform has different functionalities. For instance, Facebook is ideal for sharing newsworthy articles, whereas Twitter is more of a conversational tool – i.e. get involved in local chats. Instagram is heavily visual and great for sharing images of the office, the latest products etc. Treat them differently, and you’ll begin to see more engagement.
⭐ Use visuals. While a link to your latest blog post, for instance, more than serves a purpose – consider using visuals for social media. For example, if a blog can be turned into an Infographic, do it. You can then share on the likes of Pinterest, Imgur (and you’ll get better traction when it comes to outreach also). Likewise, share videos and images of the office, latest products, case studies etc. It doesn’t even have to be hard work as the likes of the iPhone has a screen record button, which you can use to showcase a new service page on your website.
Twitter 🐦 @FlowDigitalLtd
'Use visuals for social media: if a blog can be turned into an Infographic, do it!' - Lauren Green of @FlowDigitalLtd tells us her top social media marketing tips. Read more now! Click To Tweet
“I’m the COO at Bulldog Digital Media (a digital marketing agency specialising in SEO), meaning my responsibilities are really varied and no day is the same. You can usually find me overlooking all employee activity; figuring out ways to better our systems and maintain a great company culture (which Bulldog is well known for). Creating engaging and fun content is really important to me and I feel it says a lot about a brands persona. As well as this, I’ll be found digging deep into our clients accounts and ensuring they’re going above and beyond their online goals.”
Social Media Marketing Tips:
⭐ Create a schedule and stick to it. When creating social content, it can be easy to get ahead of yourself and publish it as soon as it’s made. We’ve found that creating a social calendar and sticking to it means that your social channels will look far more natural and achieve an overall greater engagement.
⭐ Monitor your platforms. It may seem like the best idea to publish everything on all your platforms, but realistically, something that you publish on Instagram may not get the same reception when on Twitter. Analyse your audiences on each platform and figure out where certain bits of content will work best.
⭐Know your brand. A brand personality is very easy to push on social media, and is something that you should utilise as a business. If you want people to know that you’re a fun business, then show it through your social content. Want to show off your expertise? Create social content to show that. Tailoring your content to fit your brand personality is incredibly important and something a lot of businesses tend to overlook.
Twitter 🐦 @leedobson
Instagram 📸 @theleedobson
Tips from the pros: 'We’ve found that creating a social calendar means that your social channels will look far more natural and achieve an overall greater engagement' @leedobson Read more here! Click To Tweet
“My name is Byron and my job role at MADE is to ensure our department is delivering a service offering to our clients that is of the highest quality, whilst constantly refining how we work to improve our processes and efficiencies so that we can grow our department and its profitability. Along with the above we endeavour to ensure that we are plugged in to the latest social media trends, platforms and functionality updates to ensure we are leveraging the full power of social to provide our clients with social solutions that are not only exciting, but relevant to their core objectives.”
Social Media Marketing Tips:
⭐ Understand the full functionality of each respective platform and leverage that functionality to your benefit. Twitter lists are a great example of this, by being able to
create curated lists for your brands, it allows for easy check-up and engagement with with these lists to ensure engagement opportunities are never missed.
⭐ Just because you’re a brand, doesn’t mean you need to have a presence on every social platform. Some brands just aren’t suited for certain channels, for whatever reason it may be, it is often better to accept this and put all your focus into the channels that suit the brand as opposed to trying to shoe-horn the brand and its messaging onto a platform for the sake of it.
⭐ Understand your audiences and how to pull them down the funnel. At the end of the day, brands publish content in order to increase their bottom line. By being aligned with your clients’ business goals, sales funnels can be created from your audiences to strategically pull them down the funnel to ensure a maximum ROI for your client.
Twitter 🐦 @made_agency
Instagram 📸 @made_agency
'Understand the full functionality of each respective platform and leverage that functionality to your benefit!' Check out more #socialmediamarketing tips from Byron @made_ageny here! Click To Tweet
“I am the PR and Marketing Manager at Twist – a PR and marketing agency specialising in spotlighting brands and creating engaging conversations, based in Newcastle. We deliver completely bespoke marketing campaigns covering everything from PR to social media, event management to copywriting. Our clients cover a range of sectors including; leisure, lifestyle, food & drink and interiors. Social media plays an essential part of what we do at Twist. We have a strong track record of building audience engagement (not just by followers) through social media campaigns that captivate and inspire audiences.”
Social Media Marketing Tips:
⭐ Live and breathe the sectors your clients serve. Make sure you put yourself in your client’s shoes, use their terminology and style of language, and ensure your content resonates with the audiences your trying to reach.
⭐ Be aware of important days of the year and popular hashtags such as #TBT. Always look to engage with these days on your Instagram channels, as when used well your reach can greatly increase. However, don’t force it! If there isn’t an obvious link then don’t post – your followers will see right through it.
⭐ Don’t forget to use Camel Case. When using hashtags, always capitalise the start of each word to make the tags easy to read and understand. Also, if you choose to use only lowercase words you run the risk of posting words you may not want to share with your followers eg. expletives.
⭐ Create a social media schedule. Look to produce a social media schedule, it doesn’t need to be too far in advance – we tend to run on a 2 week rolling period. We look at our insights to see what has and hasn’t worked and then tweak the schedule where necessary. Having a schedule doesn’t mean you can’t stray from it every so often (sometimes you just need to post there and then) – but it does help keep you on track!
Twitter 🐦 @thisistwist
Instagram 📸 @thetwistgroup
Top Social Media Marketing Tips (From People In The Know) Click To Tweet
We’ll be keeping this blog post updated with more social media marketing tips and tactics from the pros!
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