Social media is an essential part of any successful business. We’re all on some platform or another, whether it be LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram (or all four!) However, it can be difficult to know how to utilise these channels to maximise the effects it can have on your business.
How do you get a bigger reach? How do you know what you’re putting out there is reaching the right people? How do you turn your team into digital ambassadors? And, perhaps most importantly, how do you make posts about bookkeeping interesting?
To answer all these questions and more, and to help you navigate the social media landscape in the most advantageous way, Evolve hosted a webinar with Sunny Bird and Lizzie McManus from Sunny Bird PR about the power of digital ambassadors and social media in general.
The full webinar can be viewed here, but below are some highlights:
- “Don’t focus on how to ‘do social’, focus on how to ‘be social’.”
- “Don’t let social media be about just ticking a box. The clue to social media is in the title, it’s meant to be a social space where you naturally, organically and authentically engage with other people. Actually make an effort to be social. You should be engaging, not just posting.”
- “Take responsibility for what you’re posting instead of just letting it happen. Have a strategy and a plan, goals to reach and KPIs to hit so you’re actually accountable and you achieve something, you’re making social media work for you.”
- “There’s no point in doing four channels really badly; choose one or two channels that work for you and do them really well.”
- “Have some brand guidelines so you have a very clear vision of the colours you use, of the language and tone of voice, so when people land on your social media it’s like they’ve walked into your shop. They need to get an instant feeling of who you are as a brand.”
- “The job of your digital ambassadors is to create quality content inline with your brand guidelines and algorithm research.”
- “It’s really important to have a schedule. Social media is so fast that a post can get very lost, so you need to know what time people are really on your channel.”
- “When you engage, it’s really, really important to be authentic. If you sound like a robot, like a faceless company, people aren’t going to relate to you.”
- “If you don’t know your analytics, if you don’t know whether your posts are successful, you may as well not bother. You can’t make your social media better unless you know where it’s failing or where it’s succeeding, and you need to change or build on those.”
- “Objectives, target audience, brand messaging, content, schedule, how to engage, and your evaluation—these form the core of your social media strategy.”
- “There are lots of different ways to create content. We have mobile phones, which are like mini-computers in our hands, so there’s no reason why you and your teams can’t make great content.”
- “If there’s one thing to take away is that you create genuinely engaging content. The first way to do this is to build a community with your followers, and they’ll only feel part of your community if they feel involved in what you’re doing—reach out to them and discuss ideas, share knowledge.”
- “Your content doesn’t have to look polished. It’s about looking genuine; you can just record yourself or your team via a phone, you don’t have to have a whole studio set up.”
- “You should be spending 80% of your time on social media engaging, and if you’re not doing that you really need to rethink your strategy.”
- “You need really strong visual content that stops people scrolling past you. Some good tips are to use multiple images in one post and ask questions in the post because it gets people talking among each other.”
- “On LinkedIn, ask for feedback and recommendations, engage with other people’s posts and encourage them to engage with yours, share relatable content that’s personal, use images and videos of you and your team and, if you’re having an event, tag all the business that are attending.”
- “These days, it’s not about the number of followers you have, but the quality. Make sure the people you’re following are the type you’d like to have follow you back.”
- “I think you could do loads of good posts about bookkeeping.! We find that the drier the industry, the more fun you can have because you’ve got to be really creative.”