As a business on social media, you do have a great opportunity to get in front of your customers like never before – most adults in the UK with social media accounts now spend up to 2 hours per day on social media channels, but knowing what to post is not always easy.
First, consider a few don’ts...
- Don't just post endless adverts or promotional posts
- Don't post the same thing over and over again
- Don't hijack trending topics if they are not relevant to your business/followers
So, what should you post?
Posts which share your online content. Posting links to your blog or other website content is a great way of getting it in front of people and it should be relevant and interesting to your followers. Sharing your blog content, infographics, event information, white papers etc. on social media helps to build confidence in your company. If you are producing content for your customers, by all means, share it on social media. A company which creates content will be viewed as more authoritative in its field than one which does not.
Industry news and information.
Posts which share news and information from your wider industry is great to post on social media, not least because you have not had to create it yourself! For instance, if you work in estate agency, post a link to the most up to date information on house prices, if you are an accountancy firm share news about recent budget changes. These kind of topics are sure to be of interest to your followers and show that you are keeping up to date. For companies which serve their local communities, local news and events are also great things to post about, it shows you are engaged with your local community.
Other people's content
Again, there is nothing wrong with sharing blog posts and other content created by others if they are interesting and relevant. Of course, you are unlikely to want to share content created by a direct competitor but interesting content which has been created by other people is fine to share. We often post links to other’s blog posts if they are addressing issues which we think our followers will be interested in, or which may be of interested to others working in the same industry as us. One example of this would be, links to design resources like free images or new fonts.
Posts which increase engagement
There is a place for online competitions and ‘like and share’ posts but there is no substitute for genuine engagement. Try to start a conversation with your followers. Ask a question, canvas opinion, run a poll, these are all ways which you can get people naturally engaging with you on social media.
Promotional Posts
As long as it is not the only thing you share, it is fine to post promotional content on social media. If you have a special offer or sale, a new product line or service, new testimonials or case studies, you can absolutely post these on social media. Once again, make quality and relevance your watchwords, endless posts which just say, 'use us, we’re great!’ are not very interesting or helpful to anyone.
If you want more information about social media and digital marketing as a whole, download our factsheet – ‘top ten tips for digital marketing success’.