A few months ago, one of our clients asked for a “paint by numbers” guide to complementing our social media management work. Essentially, they were asking for the simple version of what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. For many brands, there is at least one face of the brand (sometimes more), and while a great social media strategist can help post and create strategy around a brand, and even sometimes personal profiles, only that person directly will ever be able to do it to the best capability. Why? Simply put: social media contractors are not YOU. Only YOU are YOU. We can’t fully get inside your head. So, while you can hire someone to do a lot of the heavy lifting, there are a few things every individual can do to help maximize those efforts.
So, we pulled together a few simple things every face of a brand can do to help complement any corporate social media efforts being done. These are easy things that you can customize to fit your own strategy, and are great reminders for any of us (yes, us included) to keep doing regularly. These are the things that are the icing on the cake to any solid social media strategy and they could be the things that help drive you greater results.
Remember, YOU know yourself best and the types of things you would say, do, and share on social media. YOU know who you need to connect with and stay in front of to drive your sales. YOU are the one who can help take these basic “paint by number” tasks and turn them into a true piece of art for your business growth.
LinkedIn:
- Connect with more strategic people daily on LinkedIn. Even if you only have the free version, go connect with people who will help drive the needle for your business. These kinds of people may include:
- Referral Sources
- Potential Clients
- Association/Industry Leaders
- Like any company profile posts you see come across your feed. AKA: Support your own brand posts. By doing this, you give more awareness to the business profile.
- Share your recent content strategically. One simple way to do this is with a recent article or video you publish as the brand. Send these recent contents’ links in quick messages. “Hey, we just published this article about XYZ,. And thought you might be interested…”. This drives traffic back to your website and by doing the individual message, you make the connection more intentional. People respond better to individual messages rather than mass blasts to large groups.
- Comment back on any comments you receive on your personal profile’s posts/content. The more engagement your post gets, the more LinkedIn will continue to show it out to people. Make sure to tag people in your reply whenever it makes sense.
Twitter:
- Retweet and engage with content that is relevant. Continue to post or retweet anything that interests you personally or professionally. Remember, you can post a ton within a small timeframe, so for most professionals, you don’t have to stress about posting too much.
- Try to tag any businesses or profiles that are relevant and aim to use a couple hashtags that work with the context. We like to incorporate hashtags into the sentence whenever possible because it can save on the total characters in the sentence/post. Otherwise, throw the hashtags after any text you write.
- If you see your brand tweets show up on your feed, give them some love by “hearting” or re-sharing them.
Facebook:
- On your personal profile, when you see your company’s posts, feel free to share them over to your personal feed. I would do this a couple times a week at most, and try to mix in other content as well. As in, you don’t want 100% of what you talk about on social media to be about one subject matter because you’ll start to alienate people who don’t care about it or don’t know what it is yet.
- Invite your friends to like your business page. If you’ve already gone through friends who might be interested, make a note to check in every few months to see if there are any new friends you’ve recently connected with who could be invited.
- Engage with any business colleagues’ posts, whether it’s about business or not. Any time you can stay top of mind with people in a positive way, you will be on their radar when they need your services.
- Send a voice direct message to thank people for following you and maybe even ask them a question or two that you can use in future content.
- Engage with followers’ content by commenting, liking, or responding to their Stories content.
You could spend hours upon hours engaging in the activities above. You need to be judicious with what platforms you invest your time in and how often. Just because we’ve listed out a lot of ways to engage, doesn’t mean you have to do all of them every single day. Figure out where you get the most bang for your buck, and then go all in. Show your human side, enhance your corporate, business content, and ultimately engage with the people who will drive your business forward. It’s not rocket science that we’re talking about here. It’s simple things that will help you, as the face of your brand, grow your business and make the most out of the social media content your team (like Tintero Creative) is putting out into the world for your company.