03 Oct The Devil’s in the Details: 4 Small Social Details You Can’t Ignore

Sometimes it can feel like managing social media is a fickle business. One month, your traffic and engagements are through the roof and the next thing you know, your numbers are in a free fall. It’s even more frustrating when you can’t pinpoint the issue and it feels like your approach was consistent from month to month. Well, social media may not be fickle, but it is a little ‘touchy’. These small mistakes may not seem like a big deal, but they add up quickly in the social world.

Posting at 3am

Although it may seem like it, your audience isn’t on social media 24 hours a day. And while you may be up and working on your social presence at 3am, if no one is awake to click through, it’s a wasted effort. Social media, at its core, is all about reaching people ‘where they are’ and by extension ‘when they’re there’. You can review your own analytics to see what post times work best for your audience, but there are some generally accepted standards that will make finding the right time to schedule your posts easier and more efficient!

Rushing Through the Posting Process

Think of how quickly you scroll through your own social media feeds when you’re not working. Your users are scrolling just as quickly. So, every time you set up a post, your number one goal should be to stand out from the crowd and grab attention. Take the time to make sure your post is formatted correctly instead of just ‘trying to get something up’. While standards vary from platform to platform, here are a few questions to ask yourself before you hit ‘post’.

• Is my content relevant to my audience? Really?
• Have I included an image? Is it clear, relevant to the content, and eyecatching?
• Does my tweet, caption or comment make sense? Is it concise and interesting enough to get my viewer to click, without being vague or cliché?
• Have I #madeupahashtag to be funny? Are there any more widely used or researched hashtags I should include?
• Is this timely? By the time it goes live, will anyone still be interested in what the content has to say? 

Operating in a Vacuum

Whether it’s an effort to control content or simply an oversight, many page managers make the mistake of treating their page as an island. They only post content they’ve found or created, and they do little in the way of reaching out or interacting with other pages. This may seem like a good way to keep your brand’s content ‘pure’ but in the end, it limits your reach and will lead to your page getting stale. You don’t want to go out and start sharing your competition’s content on your page, necessarily, but identifying relevant, reliable pages that you can interact with and ‘build a relationship’ with will only help to strengthen your social efforts and broaden your reach.

Posting Multiple Times a Day, Everyday

Sure, it seems like in the world of social media, more is more, right? And at face value, it would almost make sense that flooding your page with posts would be a great way around all of those pesky algorithms…no and no. High volume posting only leads to annoyed users, and annoyed users are all the more likely to hit the ‘unfollow’ button. Unless it’s a big occasion (like posting live updates about a big event), keep your regular posting schedule to no more than 4 days a week, and no more than twice a day. The old cliché ‘quality over quantity’ could not be more true in this case.

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