Top 10 Bite-Sized Advice Tips for Social Media PR

Bite-Sized Advice Tip One

The starting point for any Social Media programme is to have clearly defined goals of what it is you want to achieve from it BEFORE you begin.  For example, do you want to strengthen awareness of your organisations brand? Do you want to drive two way conversations with customers and stakeholders to find out more about your customers (market intelligence)? When you start with specific high level objectives like these, the strategies for achieving them through social media become easier to see and formulate.

Bite-Sized Advice Tip Two

The old phrase “quality rather than quantity” is very true for Social Media.  Don’t fall into the all too tempting trap of engaging in every form of social media out there. It will likely cost you because you will likely find that you cannot devote the time to maintaining and engaging effectively on them all. Choose the right social media channel and devote time to it.

Bite-Sized Advice Tip Three

Start with a Facebook fan page or Twitter account for your business and grow it from there. Facebook is a good medium for rapidly increasing awareness of a brand or company in my opinion and experience. Look at competitors Facebook fan pages and their Twitter updates, how are they using Twitter and Facebook?  How many of their “fans” or “followers” are actively engaging with them? What results are they seeing, what is working for your competitors and what is not working? What can you do differently for your followers?

Bite-Sized Advice Tip Four

Don’t just use text in your Facebook status updates and tweets. Use images, web-links and even video links and uploads as well to add life to your Social Media profiles. Your aim is to continue to captivate and maintain the interest of your fans and followers and I have found images and video in particular are very effective at doing just that for clients.

Bite-Sized Advice Tip Five

Ensure that you regularly add content to your social media site or blog in order to keep it “alive” If your blog, Twitter and Facebook pages are not updated regularly then your followers and fans will fast fall away. Always search engine optimise your content by using appropriate keywords and tags.

Bite-Sized Advice Tip Six

Always reward and encourage loyalty from your Facebook “fans” and Twitter “followers” This can be done by special promotions, competitions or product discounts that only they can avail of. Also be sure to respond to any comments from fans or followers.  In the world of Social Media nothing annoys a user more than leaving a comment and getting no reply. Users who leave a comment do so because they want engagement!

Bite-Sized Advice Tip Seven

Don’t delete complaints from customers on Facebook or indeed other social media channels.  Deleting a comment will annoy the complainant further, leading to the increased risk of negative publicity. Acknowledge the complaint on their posting, so everyone can see this. Next, take the conversation offline by private messaging the complainant to resolve their complaint. Once their complaint has been resolved, and with their permission, update the original posting to say that the complaint has been resolved satisfactorily.

Bite-Sized Advice Tip Eight

Creating good quality content that is of interest to the reader is what builds long term engagement in the Social Media world.  So don’t be afraid to ask your Facebook fans, bloggers and Twitter followers what sort of information they would like to see from you, and respond accordingly.

Bite-Sized Advice Tip Nine

Social Media measurement against your stated goals is vital, you need to know that what you are doing is working and investment in terms of staff time is paying off.  Focus equally on both qualitative and quantitative measurement. Do not solely use quantitative measurement like simply counting the number of fans or followers. Things to pay particular attention to is measuring engagement rates from Bloggers, fans on Facebook and Twitter as well as content consumption trends via the numerous analytics tools available.

Bite-Sized Advice Tip Ten

Just do it!  Many companies say they want to get into Social Media but often delay.  But if your competitors are already using Social Media then so should you!