You should be fully aware of all the different areas in Social Media - so take a look at our Social Media Triangle to the right. A comprehensive Social Media Strategy covers all 3 sides:

• The Activity you Earn (likes, Follows and Shares)
• The Activity you Buy (Advertising)
• The Reputation you Manage (Reviews & Testimonials)

Covering all three requires the right tools and Market Pulse is perfect for that.   And remember, the whole point of growing your Social Media is to drive traffic to your website.

Post Frequency

We recommend that you post at least twice per month in order to stimulate internet algorithms for service businesses that rely on reviews and Google for their leads.  Posting twice per month will not create much user engagement but is the minimal amount necessary to ‘raise your hand’ and show each network that you are operational and active.  If you are running a marketing strategy that is Business to Consumer with an Organic and Social Media heavy strategy you need to post multiple times a week and more than 50% should be video.

What to Post

Your Social Media feed should have a variety.  Promoting your services and specials are great to add but if that is all you promote it creates a boring experience and may encourage people to engage when they want to purchase something from you, but when lacking other types of content it literally chases away other types of engagement.  We recommend a variety of 8 types of posts:

1. Awards, Reviews, and Accolades - Employee of the month, industry awards for your business, and even sharing encouraging reviews from your customers.
2. Wow People with your Knowledge - Include tips, rules of thumb, and wisdom.  This is a great way to teach them something which then makes you an authority figure.
3. Stories - People love stories and will pay full attention to understand the character, plot, and resolution.  This is where you can share stories of huge success and other stories of catastrophic failure.  It is through story where you can give case studies and tell about who you rescued or stories of people who were ‘doing it wrong’ and you cleaned up the mess.  Through your story people need to know that your competitors make headaches but you solve problems.
4. Products/Services/Promotions - Yes social media is a great place to make sure visitors know what your business is about and to announce when you have some type of sale or special.
5. Humor - as an expert in the industry you have plenty of opportunity to share what is fun and/or funny about what you do.
6. Community Involvement - Do you support club soccer, a peewee baseball team, or help at the homeless shelter?  These and others are a great way to show prospective customers how much you care about your community. In addition, pictures of you taking the pee wee baseball team out for ice cream at the end of a game make great photos that parents and grandparents will be sure to ‘like’ and ‘share’.
7. Blog Articles - Writing blog articles on your website is a great way to share your knowledge and show your experience; but don’t stop there.  Share your articles on Social Media and even an email blast to drive traffic to your website.  Ultimately that is what Social Media is all about - brand awareness and driving traffic to your website.
8. Current Events - What major happenings in your community, industry, and country are attracting attention?  What is your take on this? How does it affect your industry?  How does it affect your customers?

Improving Engagement

In addition to the variety of posts mentioned above, the most effective messages are posts that people will want to share.  For example if I posted: “We create advertisements with a clear message” As a customer of Torchlight you may want to smash the ‘Like’ button but that is not content that you would share. Content that is more likely to be shared are tips, wisdom, and humor.  When people share it it makes them look smart or funny.

Getting More Followers

• Stories (or Shorts in YouTube) - the newest shining thing in Social Media (thanks TikTok!).  These gets more attention since it is the latest feature of several channels
• Boosting Posts - the gateway drug to advertising - this allows you to pay for relevance and reach the followers of your followers.  We recommend a budget of $100-$200 per month for boosting the occasional post.  Spend about $25 per boost.
• Hashtags - are helpful to 'tag' your video with a collection of other videos that use the same hashtag.  Think of it like assigning your video to a category.  This created opportunities for more views from new visitors who have interest in a particular hashtags that may naver have seen your video otherwise.
• Ask your clients - your clients are the most qualified as your relevant audience.  When they follow you, if they like and share your posts you are much more likely to attract more of your target audience.
• Content - the content you posts matters, it will attract people who search for that type of content.  That is why variety is also important (see above - ‘What to Post’)

Mentions

Just like a hashtag, mentions are a great way to bring in new people to your Social Media feed.  The best way to leverage a mention is natively on the Social Media app, not through Market Pulse.  Market Pulse allows you to tag mentions in Twitter and Facebook; however LinkedIn, Instagram, nor Google My Business allows third party tagging mentions. This is inconvenient, however necessary because rarely does the business that you want to mention have the same handle across all their Social Media accounts. So to get the most out of a mention, we recommend that you make these posts natively on each Social Media platform.

References

Tips for Pinterest 

About Social Marketing 

YouTube SEO Best Practices