Social Media Tips for Beginners and Optimisers

Social media is such a prominent fixture in the daily lives of many, and we mean many! With over 4.89 billion social media users worldwide, social media platforms are undoubtedly where your customers chose to hang out.  And as social media channels are highly adaptive to the evolving habits of us complex creatures, they offer some of the most effective ways to connect with your customers.

If you’re curious about what goes into a social media strategy and how to go about creating one, stay with us as our team of in-house social media experts make it light work and walk you through some do’s and don’ts. Learn how we’ve innovated the social space, and if you’re an old hand at social media you might want to fast track to the end where we’ll chat you through how to make those trickier data-driven decisions that might just improve your already great performance.

Get Goal Setting: Social Media Goals And How to Define Them

A strategy is designed to help you achieve your goals.  So, get clear on what you are trying to achieve. This will help you define goals for your social media channels. These may include things like:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Driving website traffic
• Generating leads and sales
• Building brand loyalty and trust
• Establishing thought leadership
• Providing customer support

Defining your goals

Knowing what you want to achieve sets the direction of travel, so invest a bit of time defining your goals.  You should try to align these to your commercial business objectives. If you’re a start-up, your growth strategy will be reliant on building brand awareness and generating leads. Perhaps you’re a smaller business, seeking to create a greater community presence and engage local followers. Bigger business with a great following on social media, maybe now there’s an opportunity to increase customer loyalty and offer your channel for enhanced and real time customer service.

Avoid skipping goals and acting in haste.

We get it, you may be eager to get going, but take the time to make sure your social goals align to your business goals too. This is fundamental and can help guide your budget, hold you accountable, and help you clearly analyse data, so don’t act in haste!

Identifying Your community or Target Audience

Identifying your target audience and community is integral to getting your product and service in front of the right people. Plug in all you know already like age, gender, location, interests, and behaviours. Consider then how relevant your content is to your wide audience. Perhaps there is an opportunity to build out some custom audiences to target specific products.  Not sure what they are, we can help you identify these and target the right people to create maximum return with your content.

Use Insights (We’ve Built Communities for Clients Countless Times On These)

January is a challenging month for all so we worked with Centra and SuperValu to create a campaign to bring their best value deals to customers at a time when they needed it most. Knowing  competitor brands would also be pushing value-led campaigns at this time we sought to achieve creative standout on social media to achieve real cut through. And of course true to the brand character we created a campaign that would be entertaining and light-hearted.

We proposed a dual-channel social activation strategy to launch the Epic Deals video series. Using Meta, our key objective was to generate awareness of the Epic Deals campaign and to deliver video views across the content on Facebook and Instagram. We ensured good social interaction by engaging cult heroes Roy Walker, Paddy Raff, and Cherrie On Top as part of our influencer-led approach.

Social media engagement was huge and of course really landing that message around the Epic Deals ensured in-store sales increased too! You can find out more about it here.

How To Choose the Right Social Media Platforms

How many social apps have you got on your phone? Yes, like the rest of the nation that’s no doubt more than you care to admit to. With platforms popping up left right and centre, it can be difficult deciding where to concentrate effort. Here’s some of our thoughts:

1. Facebook: Why We Like It

The OG of social media, Facebook is massive (2.93 billion monthly active users massive) and is still the largest social media platform about. So, why do we like it?

It’s still super popular with shoppers as 66% of Facebook users visit a local business page at least once a week. Not only that, 69% of online shoppers who use Meta platforms weekly made purchases after seeing personalised content on Facebook or Instagram. Pretty great stats from the original social site.

2. Instagram: Why We Like It

We love pictures and so do millennials. If you have a product that is visual Instagram is the one.

With most users being millennials and Gen Z, they’re great options for brands or businesses that want to connect with younger audiences.

90% of Instagram users follow a business and 62.3% of Instagram users worldwide say they use the platform to follow or research brands and products. Win Win!

3. TikTok: Why We Like It

 “TikTok made me buy it”. Currently the most downloaded mobile app in the world, with 672 million downloads.

The ultimate channel for people wanting to make entertaining content, it is an amazing channel for generating brand awareness and building customer loyalty.

We have our very own dedicated Team of TikTokers at MXB (and we’ve got the gold badge having gone viral). Lots of our clients have been trialling TikTok, to incredible success, even those who initially feared the channel.  Chat to us to learn more about how your brand could show up in this space!

4. LinkedIn: Why We Like It

 For all our corporate queens (and kings), LinkedIn is the ultimate professional platform for networking and thought leadership.

We like it because it gives businesses and brands the chance to showcase their work effectively to peers and potential clients. This is where long-form content can thrive. Where newsletters, case studies and real detailed project work is properly engaged with.

We offer clients bespoke LinkedIn strategies and have a lot of proven success in delivering lead gen campaigns that have directly impacted conversion.  Talk to us about your LinkedIn strategy today, clients are often surprised at how quickly results can be achieved on this channel.

Goals, check.

Audience, check.

Channel plan, check.

Content….

Ah, The Exciting Part – Let’s Chat Content!

So, there is an ABC to developing social content strategy. Your three major considerations being: content themes, content formats, and content frequency.

Here’s What We Think About Content Themes:

What’s not to love about a great theme!  Themed parties, themed outfits, themed buns, just us? Maybe. You name it, we’re onboard with it. The same is true for your content. You want content that is themed to align with your brand values and helps express the true brand character.  The true acid test for any brand, that you can recognise, and know who owns the content before the brand mention.

And creating that ownability has huge opportunity too. One of our clients recognised the growing sales opportunity around Halloween and asked us to help their brand stand out and own this occasion.  We created a campaign that has been grown year on year and a this point has several national awards under its belt! Not bad for content that is designed to entertain every but as much as its designed to sell product and position the brand.  Kudos to our Digital Creative Director Shay Reynolds, he dreams this stuff up in his sleep. Actually.

Here’s What We Think About Content Formats:

Everyone wants to create great social content but to really win in this space consider what works best for your business. We like to trial and test different content formats when getting started with clients, especially if they’re new or in unchartered territory.

Across the board we can appreciate how video gets better engagement than static visuals, a few nuances to this, but highly contextual and circumstantial so we’ll bank that insight for later.

Of course, if you can invest in video to attract and engage your audience then your content can prove much more effective at driving CTR and ROI.

A top insight from one of our recent client campaigns, be flexible with your content and let the results inform format.  One of our clients wanted to run their competition with video as they understood that format to be more engaging and entertaining. But from close, real-time analytics we could see the audience responded better to the competition metric as a static post. We asked the client to pivot to ensure we were able to generate traction from the social post and get meaningful engagement from their online community.

Here’s What We Think About Content Frequency:

We can all appreciate that posting regularly and with committed effort is important for brand growth. It shows your audience that you are relevant and even contactable. Consistency is key here for building your brand and nurturing trust with your audience.

In our experience the optimal number of posts on the mainstream social channels is four to five times a week. Posting any more can risk diluting your engagement.

The big challenge for us in agency land is overly zealous clients, who want to post two to three times a day. Here we work hard to demonstrate how this affects engagement and we appeal to all clients, let the data guide you.

If you’re going it alone, good luck, hopefully this has provided or cemented your approach.  If you’re still not quite sure how to curate your social content strategy, get in touch.  We’re content experts, award-winning in this space, and we’re happy to help you work through how best you can develop content that delivers results.

Measuring and Analysing Social Media Performance

Social content strategy, check.

Now it’s time to analyse how it all worked.

When you want to understand how well your content is performing and tweak it to continuously improve its performance, there are some metrics you want to assess:

• Reach: The number of people who have seen your content.
• Impressions: The number of times your content has been seen.
• Engagement: The number of likes, comments, and shares your content has received.
• Click-through rate: The percentage of people who clicked on a link in your content.
• Conversions: The number of people who took a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form.

We are in ongoing surveillance mode on all of the above across the brands we work with.  These span industry sectors, international markets, customers and consumers.  The grand sum of which makes us insight rich and of course eternally committed to helping clients make data-driven decisions that bring continued success to their brands.

And after all that, you’re either fired up and ready to go, or you’ve decided you want A Hand With Social Media For Your Business?

We got you. We’re a digitally awarded creative agency, passionate about creating cut-through content. We work with sector leading brands and industry leading businesses and the proof is in the pudding.

If you’d like to use social media to help your brand scale, get in touch with us today!