Social Media Best Practices for 2016

It’s almost 2016, and with the New Year comes a fresh start to – you guessed it – your social media marketing! Whether you’ve fallen off track from a busy year or have never visited Facebook.com, there’s no better time to start improving your social media presence. Properly maintaining your social media channels is a fun, worthwhile way to help your business grow and a move you won’t regret.

Our advice: Don’t just HAVE a social media presence, build and sustain your channels by living by these best practices:

Facebook

• Keep up with your editorial calendar (also called a content calendar). This means keeping track of post frequency and timely interaction with fans.
• Add the appropriate information about your company to the page. Some fans might visit looking for the business phone number, address or just an overview of who you are. Make sure they can find that information and that it’s accurate.
• Let your customers know the company is on Facebook and what they can gain by liking the page. This includes advertising your page on marketing materials, both in-store and on your website.

Twitter

• Tweets can only be 140 characters, but that doesn’t mean you have to max it out. Keep your tweets short and sweet to emphasize your point.
• Use hashtags when referring to an event or relevant keyword to reach a larger audience and to generally speak the language of the channel.
• When referencing names of businesses, organizations or followers, tag their Twitter handle in your tweet using the @ symbol. (i.e., @thundertech) Make sure to double-check that the handle you’re tagging is correct before tweeting it!

Instagram

• An important tip for both Instagram and Twitter is to monitor the hashtags you use in your own posts. This way you can keep track of who’s saying what and how you’re contributing to the conversation.
• Use the photo-editing tools. Instagram ditched the small selection of filters for more variety to give photos just about any feel you want. Plus, you can change things like the brightness and contrast, or even blur out a part of the photo to focus on another. This makes for hours of fun, trust us.
• Since Instagram doesn’t currently have native analytics, test out posting photos at different times and on days of the week to get a better understanding of the optimal times when your followers are engaging.

LinkedIn

• Identify employee experts who would be good contributors to your company page to present the most engaging content.
• Drop the sales-speak, and instead be friendly and helpful. While LinkedIn is still the most business-like and professional of the social media bunch, it’s not a place to be cold.
• Interact with your page’s followers. LinkedIn isn’t just a place to collect a network and forget about them, but instead a place to keep the conversation going.

YouTube

• Create playlists on your channel by theme to make finding similar videos easier for YouTubers.
• Visitors and subscribers view your page differently, so add a featured video for people who aren’t already subscribed to encourage them to do so.
• Keep an eye on YouTube analytics to get an idea of the type of content that works and doesn’t.

Have other best practices and tips to share? Leave them in the comments below!