Three Easy Steps to Take to Avoid a Common Mistake on Social Media

Using social media correctly can generate brand awareness, drive traffic and increase inbound leads to your business; it can even help increase direct sales online. The temptation that businesses run into when managing their social media is to share the same posts and same content across all channels.

With social media management software like Hootsuite, Buffer and SocialOomph, the risk is to use the formula of 1 post + 1 button = all channels. Unfortunately not all content is created equal and not every channel is right for the same content. In social media not everybody needs to know everything, not everybody cares about everything you have to say, and certainly nobody likes to feel spammed with jargon or hard sells. The keyword in selecting channels is “Relevant Content” – ok, there are two words.

How can you create relevant content? By analyzing whom you’re speaking to, what you want them to do, and where they spend their time..

1. Who are you speaking to? The first step is to know what your customers think, hear, do, say and feel about the product or service you are offering. It is an easier exercise than you may think. Everybody in the company has an educated idea of the answers to some or all of these questions. From customer service, your sales force, employees that use the product/service themselves, to product designers analyzing future trends, ask them!

2. What do you want them to do? Not everybody listening on your social channels has the same role in your marketing plan. There might be people listening that are the direct buyers of your product or perhaps they’re the referrers and advocates of the product. There may also be investors and prospective employees, to name a few. Know what you want your audience to do with your message and product so you can give them clear calls to action.

3. Where do they spend their time? Each channel has its own social behavior, people go to different channels for different reasons and to do different things. Some examples:

1. They go to Facebook to experience your brand, they want to be entertained and told a story
2. They go to Twitter for news, headlines and easy to digest useful information from influencers
3. They go to Pinterest to be inspired, to learn something new and experience a visual fantasy
4. They go to Instagram to get personal with your brand, get a behind-the-scene experience or an exclusive look on who you are
5. They go to LinkedIn for a professional relationship, for corporate news and celebration of events and employees

Once we have completed this journey into who, what and where, all that is left is to map the content to each channel by appropriate audience. Your social media followers will be more interested & engaged with your brand because now you’re sharing Relevant Content (there’s that word again – ok, two words)!

Read more of Mambo’s tips on effective community management here