Social media is the newest, largest channel for customer service in your brands wheelhouse. No doubt about it! We've talked before about the value of refreshing your social media regularly and making sure you remain consistent in your content. In this post we'll look at tips for creating content, the importance of monitoring your social media apps and how to budget time for maintaining your social media presence.
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Content:
There are a lot of great tools out there for you to use to create and share stylish content for your brand on social media. First and foremost, working with either your marketing lead (or yourself, if that's you!) design between three and five 'styles' of post that you want to put in your rotation.
Some categories to get started:
Behind the Scenes --> This could be workshop sneak peaks, team day snapshots, insight into product design or testing, etc.
'How To' Guides --> Become a knowledge base for your customers/clients and they will revert to you for more than just your products. Knowledge empowers and helps build trust which will go miles in the long run.
Product/Service Focus --> Show off what you make OR do! Not every one will understand or have a pre-awareness. It's up to you to be clear and direct.
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Use scheduling software to then preplan when and where those posts will go live. Services such as Hootsuite allow you to plan out your social media calendar with an exacting eye, even sometimes providing feedback on popular traffic times etc. You can schedule on Facebook's 'Meta Manager' for Facebook and Instagram posts -- but be wary, that can be fiddly differentiating platforms on their UX (user design). Take your time and hone your copy/content for each platform because different users exist there and may have different pain points or needs depending on how they use the platform.
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Monitoring:
Once your content is up and out there in the world, keep an eye on how it performs to determine its value in the overall strategy. Sometimes the type of post we may think on the backend will be a top performer, can flop. It happens to the best of us! Rather than wallow in the loss, wonder why and look at the data. The number of likes a post gets is not necessarily the end-all-be-all of a posts health on social media. But it can tell you what kind of content your audience responds to. Remember earlier when you set out a few categories of post? Set a 30 day challenge of sharing them regularly and with intent. Then, review the metrics and see what the audience really engaged with -- and what you can cut. Defining and tracking your social media KPIs can become an element of your monthly marketing reports to color the 'bigger' strategy picture.
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It's been said before and it'll be said again: social media has become the biggest channel for customer service inquiries. That means tweaking and adjusting your message monitoring to reflect that. Now, working within your organizations culture you can and should nominate someone to check -- and reply! -- to comments/messages on your brand social media accounts. Within reason! Don't expect anyone to be answering messages in the middle of the night but you can and should operate your social media monitoring with the same attitude as you might the phone or emails in the office. There's no harm in a 'holding pattern' message to buy your customer service representative some time, either. Ignoring a message or comment -- especially a negative one! -- will only be more work in the long run.
Maintaining:
One of the hardest parts about managing a social media marketing strategy is maintaining the energy to keep testing, keep trying and unfortunately, keep failing. There's no real rule book out there for what works when you're marketing your brand -- all you can do is try and then try something different. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all, and as a small business owner you understand that -- you built a business from seeing a need in the market and finding your spot in it. Keep your eye on the prize and keep up the good, hard work of consistent content creation (and review!) and trackable goals.
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Summary:
In summary your social media content should be engaging and have a purpose (other than just having something to post!). Having a regular routine to check accounts and monitor not only messages but post performance will help build not only a customer service channel but a reliable picture of ROI for the strategy. And once you've started, keep going! Don't lose momentum.
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