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When to Change your Social Media Strategy
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At Red Desk we know that social media strategies are flexible and should be changed to reflect current trends and algorithms on the various social media platforms. In reality what does this mean? We give two examples of where we have changed social media strategy for clients and what you should be on the look out for.
LinkedIn
A while ago we were working with a company on their LinkedIn strategy. After some research, we set up Showcase Pages for them as they had a number of products which had completely different audiences. Showcase pages are extensions of the Company Page. You can share company updates and sponsored content with LinkedIn members who follow your relevant Showcase Pages. Take a look at Adobe as they have 5 Showcase Pages (Adobe Creative Cloud for example) set up.
When we came to review how our strategy was going, we realised that we were getting low engagements. We have since changed tactic, deactivating the Showcase Pages and started posting the content directly onto the Company page. This has seen a direct increase in interactions.
Instagram
For many small businesses Instagram can be a very effective platform, with higher engagement than organic Facebook posting, however, the company/industry/product does have to lend itself to the visual nature of this platform. Recently even though our research showed that Instagram could potentially be a good platform for our client, we quickly discovered that it was not the right for them. If your business is very much about product sales rather than brand awareness then Instagram is probably not the platform for you. We therefore pushed our efforts to Facebook, Twitter and their Google Entry which work better for this product and industry. Monitoring your statistics and insights is an integral part of managing your social media, then you can make change and reassess your strategy quickly.
For more tips on Instagram, you can read our article on Instagram for Business.
Other Red Desk Tips
Here are a few more things that we have learnt over the years:
• In 2014 Pinterest was the fastest social media platform and we set many of our creative clients up on it. However over time, Instagram has become the more popular visual platform and one that we use with our clients today. Pinterest still has it’s place in the market so don’t discount it entirely
• When a new social media platform emerges, you need to decide whether to ignore it or embrace it. Since Google+ was part of the Google family, we decided to embrace it, even running our own workshops. Google+ never really took off so we soon stopped using it for our clients. Google has now closed all the Google+ accounts
• One good thing that came out of Google+ was Google Local. This is often where potential customers find your information so it is important to claim your account and keep it updated. The social media function of Google+ has now been moved here and you can post updates onto your Google Local account which are visible for a week
• Our quarterly social media reports not only provide our clients information on how well their campaigns are doing but also valuable insights for us on when to post to gain the maximum audience and the types of content which performs best
• Finally, our research that we carry out for new clients often gives us ideas on how we can tweak the social media strategy of existing clients
If you are about to launch a product or need help with your social media strategy then get in touch with mel@reddesk.co.uk
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How long is too long for your social media posts?
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We thought we’d put together our thoughts on how long your social media posts should be to gain maximum engagement and reach, here we 
look at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, the main platforms we work on.
We commonly see incredibly long posts on Facebook and Instagram but even though those platforms allow larger character limits, (Instagram for example allows up to 2,200 characters), shorter posts usually receive more likes and comments (and shares on Facebook).
Social media posts should come to the point quickly, it’s a fast-paced world with the majority of users checking their social media on the small screen of a mobile phone while on the move, so make your posts punchy and to the point. A helpful tip is to start your posts with trigger words, words such as who, what, when, where, how and why, this should help gain an emotional response and hopefully draw your audience in.
“Why are Facebook posts of less than 80 characters more likely to grab people’s attention?”
The above question is a statement containing 72 characters or 15 words, so you can see you really need to select your information and words carefully to optimise your organic Facebook post. As Facebook now uses hashtags you can add perhaps 2 or 3 hashtags to that post.
The same is true of Instagram, although this is a media focused platform you still need good text content to gain optimum engagement, particularly hashtags, of which your post can contain a maximum of 30. You need to bear in mind that only the first 5 to 8 words of your post will be visible in your followers feed before they have to click ‘more’ to see further, so make those first few words meaningful.
“An Instagram post of around 150 characters will keep your content concise & to the point, making it more likely that your followers will read it, digest it & hopefully engage with it.”
Again, the above statement is around 150 characters long so you can see exactly how concise you need to be, you can add your hashtags to this and although 30 is the limit this is possibly a bit excessive and you should aim for perhaps 10 – 15.
Twitter is altogether more straight forward and the increase of the character limit from 140 to 280 characters in 2017 has opened up the possibilities for small business marketing. Those 280 characters have to include your hashtags, but this limit on characters is a helpful limitation and continues to keep twitter a successful micro-blogging platform.
If you need help with your social media content then get in touch: lindsay@reddesk.co.uk
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