Business owners and nonprofit leaders are busy with an endless supply of tasks, priorities and challenges that they must juggle each day. In the midst of it all, marketing is a key component to growing and sustaining their organizations, but with more communication and marketing channels than ever before, it can all become overwhelming, especially when it comes to social media marketing.
Whether a company manages its social media in-house or works with a PR and communications professional, these 10 social media dos and don’ts are helpful to keep in mind:
Don’t
- Ignore social media as part of your marketing/communications mix
- Look at social media as separate from your other communication efforts (it should be integrated with all of your PR, marketing and communication efforts)
- Put all your marketing eggs in the social media basket (social media is important, but there is no single magic marketing bullet)
- Post willy-nilly
- Forget to proof your posts. Good grammar and spelling matter – they build trust and credibility.
- Assume that the youngest person on your team is automatically the best person to manage your social media
- Let someone manage your social media who does not: 1) understand your business, 2) understand your branding, marketing and communications strategy or 3) have good writing and grammar skills
- Put your hand in every social media channel all at once to start
- Make every post all about promoting your company (it’s called “social” media for a reason – no one wants to talk to the guy at the party who only boasts about himself all night…)
- Post images you don’t have the right to publish
Do
- Integrate your social media marketing and make it part of your overall marketing communications plan
- When starting social media, pick one or two social media channels that make the most sense for your business and target market
- Monitor your social media pages; engage and respond appropriately and quickly to those who interact with you
- Proof your posts and responses – good grammar and spelling build trust and credibility
- Consider investing in social media advertising, especially for your business facebook page
- Use a “single voice” that fits your brand when posting and responding, even if several different people are responsible for your social media
- Share relevant, helpful and interesting content that appeals to your target market
- Post regularly and consistently
- Monitor your posts to gauge the type that engage your audience the most
- Post photos and branded graphics (photos garner more engagement on Facebook than any other type of post; a photo added to a tweet boosts retweets on Twitter)
