Social Media Mastery: A Guide for Businesses

Some businesses just seem made for social media. Those with a colorful product and a fun product team always do better on social media than firms that have a less exciting or interesting product to consumers. But that doesn’t mean that all firms without that intrigue factor should abandon social media as an avenue through which they might be able to extract a huge following and brilliant exposure. It just takes social media mastery to get your business seen online by more consumers, and this short guide will give you pointers on how to do it.

Planning

Social media for businesses should seem off-hand and impromptu, but in the background, you should be making plans to help you get your messaging right every time. Some of these plans should be long-term and should include:

• Off-limits posts and content that your team should know never to comment on for fear of controversy
• Content and themes that you know you can tap into in order to promote your business
• Analysis of previous posts and which garnered the most attention to guide your future posts
• Market and consumer research to see what your target audience tends to follow and enjoy
• A consideration of what content works best on different platforms across the web

Essentially, this planning phase needs to narrow down and hone the kind of messaging that you’re trying to deploy on social media. If you’re too flimsy and unplanned, you’ll not land many likes and shares; if you’re too strict and structured, that’ll also put off web users. Find that middle ground, and you’ll start impressing your followers.

Management

Now that you have a basic framework for your social media teams to follow, it’s time to get everything centralized so that each team in each jurisdiction knows what’s been posted and when. This can be achieved through smart software supplied by vendors such as SOCi, targeting larger firms that operate several social media accounts across different offices and countries.

Not only is the management of your social media page important for consistency and for letting your teams know what’s recently been posted; it’s also a way to line up content to post in the future so that you’re always able to stay one step ahead of the competition when you’re posting on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

News Agenda

There’s nothing more satisfying than sending out a hopeful tweet that contains a relevant joke and finding it shared thousands of times. This type of virality is difficult to achieve, but it’ll surely go viral when you manage to find the right tone and the right message.

You’ll find the best moments to give this strategy a go are during particular moments in the news agenda when a large but short-term event has happened – like when certain large websites crash. Curating a post that taps into the zeitgeist and makes people laugh always has the potential to go big, being shared by social media users to increase your reach. Use the tips outlined in this guide to master social media as we head towards and into 2022.