These days social media is everywhere, whether you like it or not, it’s such a drastic part of our day to day lives and a backbone for any digital business. An immense part of my job role within digital marketing is to coordinate several social media accounts across various channels. In fact, I run nine different social media accounts at one given time across channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Here are a just few vital things I’ve picked up along the way to help you better understand social media marketing and increase how you utilize this tool.

Engage your audience

Nowadays there are so many different social profiles online, so how are you meant to stand out to your target audience? The most effective way is to identify your target audience and tailor your content to best engage them. Here are seven ways in which I’ve found to be the most engaging when interacting with your followers.

1. Post humorous content: The most effective measure I’ve found in my time running social pages is to attract your audience over by just being yourself. Don’t hesitate to post content that you’d personally find funny if you saw it elsewhere online. Unless you’re selling funeral services, there’s always a way to bring light to your page’s posts.
2. Posting relevant content: Remember to post content relevant to what your site/social profile is about. If you’re the coordinator of a profile that talks all things fitness related, there’d be no benefit to begin posting about the latest episode of Game of Thrones.
3. The use of imagery or video: Don’t make your audience have to sit down and read copious piles of boring copy. Most people only have time to brief information they see online these days, so try your best to find images that can effectively get your message across whilst also being appealing to the eye.
4. Respond to your audience: If someone leaves a comment or even shares/retweets a post of yours, it’s important that you take the time to acknowledge their doing by giving a comment back to their opinion. Users love being recognized by social profiles.
5. Posting at relevant times: By taking the time to understand your audience’s geographical presence, you can schedule posts to be sent out during peak times. Why post something in the middle of the day in your current time zone if your audience is on the other side of the world. You can use tools like Buffer to help manage this.
6. Gifs… People LOVE gifs!
7. Most importantly, it’s essential to interact with your audience using the right language, which leads me to my next point.

The language you choose to use online will ultimately represent the overall image of your company to the public. It’s essential to have an effective approach tailored to your unique audience. A great example of this is the UNILAD Facebook page. The page posts content that is specifically designed to grab the attention of their younger audience. I remember at the beginning of my social media journey, my language was far from accurate. You see I work for a down to earth, hip, and innovative apps studio, however, the language I’d use when talking to our online users was instead uptight and formal.

My old language

Hello John Smith,

Thank you for making contact with us. We’re glad that you’re interested in our company. Regarding your question, we have recently sent you an email outlining why my language is so formal.

I look forward to reviewing your response in the future.

Kind regards, Lachlan Kirkwood.

My new language

Hi John, thanks for getting in touch. Have just shot you through an email about how awesome my language is. Can’t wait to hear back from you.

Cheers, Lachlan.

Of course, the language you use will alter to suit whoever it is you’re engaging with, but I have found that the most effective approach is to not sound like a robot giving an automated response. After all, people are on social networks to connect with real human beings, so why not just be one those. This is also an effective approach in getting your message across faster. Always remember that some social platforms do have word limits for posts and responses, so a more formal language approach easily chew your character limit up.

Measuring: Impressions vs engagements

So now you know how to engage your audience. That’s great, but now you need to know how to measure and track your social progress. After all, if you don’t have an effective method of measuring the performance of your content, how are you meant to know if your current social media method is correct?

There are so many important factors and key terms to understand when it comes to the wonderful, yet daunting world of social media. I’m fairly certain that the vast majority of my first week as a social media coordinated was spent Googling different acronyms and their meanings. Amongst complex terms like CTA, CPC & CTR, there are two words in particular that you’ll hear more people raving on about than they do about Pokémon GO. These two words, of course, are ‘impressions’ and ‘engagements’, and in my eyes, they’re the backbone of any social media statistics/analytics.

So what exactly are both of these words and what do they mean? An impression is a term that refers to the point in which an ad is viewed once by a visitor, or displayed once on a web page. Have you ever been scrolling through your social media feed, seen a sponsor ad and simply continue scrolling? Although you’ve just taken no action or effort to engage in that content, you’ve actually just generated an impression. An engagement on the other hand, is the most important metric in social media. An engagement is the metric used to measure the number of interactions people have with your content.

So here’s what to take from this. If you’re like me at the beginning of my job, you’ll think that 10,000 social impressions on a post means that every man and his dog is loving your content, right? But if you’re still left wondering why your posts have no likes, shares or retweets, that’s because you don’t have any engagements. Without engagements, impressions are just a number on a board. It’s essential to frequently track your social media accounts metrics to monitor how your social content is performing.

Be alert

The last major lesson I’ve learned so far as a social media coordinator is to always be alert. Monitor your social accounts like they’re your own children. For some people, running only one social account isn’t an issue. But for others who have several different accounts to constantly monitor, it can sometimes be a challenge to know what’s happening on each channel throughout the every second of the day. If you’re not aware of your profiles activity, how are you meant to engage with your audience in real time? The last thing you’d want is for an active follower to engage with your profile, only to not be responded to until days later, all because you didn’t check your profiles notifications. That’s why it’s vital to monitor your accounts like a hawk. I personally have a routine where I’ll quickly check up on my accounts once every hour just to ensure I haven’t missed any notifications.

Although I’m still only a baby when it comes to social media coordinating, I’ve already learned so many useful practices across several different social platforms. But if you’re going to take away only one thing from this post, I can’t stress how important it is to just be yourself when managing a social profile. I’m sure that deep down you’re a genuine, funny person that people love, so why not portray your page to have that same approach.

Stay tuned and subscribe to my blog for all of my updates as I continue to grow my career in digital marketing. I already can’t wait to write a following series of this post as I uncover more about social media coordinating.