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Social Media Do’s and Don’ts

September 10, 2021

Social media has come to the forefront of most business’ marketing strategies, but does that mean that everyone knows how to use it? Spoiler alert…it doesn’t!! 

As a business owner you obviously want to cash in on this gold mine, but if you don’t know how to do it properly you can do more harm than good! 

Did you know that 54% of internet users use social media to research products? 

Well, you want to make the most of that, right? To make the most of social media you need to draw in new customers and ensure that your current customers stay interested.  

Providing the right content to engage both old and new customers is vital to growing your social media presence. 

Here are a few simple dos and don’ts for you to follow to get you started with your social media marketing.  

The DOs of social media  

DO Use the Right Platforms for Your Business, Not All of Them 

Don’t get on every social media site ‘just cuz’, you don’t need to be active on every single platform.  

Look at your business, your products, and your intended customers to find out which platforms are right for you, and more importantly which are right for them. 

You don’t want to be wasting your valuable time on the wrong social media, do you? 

DO Post Regularly AND Create a Posting Schedule 

WARNING! This may BLOW your mind! Did you know that you can schedule your social media posts?! 

Long gone are the days of painstakingly posting every day manually, using a scheduling tool enables you to schedule posts weeks in advance! This may be a revelation to business owners trying to do it all. 

Managing and creating a schedule for posting will benefit both you as the business owner running a social media page AND for your followers who want consistency, but not an overload of content. 

DO engage with others AND encourage engagement 

Engagement is a two-way street, businesses should be making efforts to engage with followers and other companies whenever the opportunity arises.  

Engaging on your socials demonstrates involvement and personability in the social media community. But remember…MAKE IT EASY FOR PEOPLE TO ENGAGE WITH YOUR CONTENT!  

Put up some polls or fun quizzes on your Instagram stories or Twitter. This is also beneficial for gaining feedback from your followers. Or throw a social media giveaway contest for those who post the best photo using your product!  

As a bonus, this can help your customers to feel valued and recognised…everyone likes to feel important, don’t they? 

DO Use Video Whenever Possible 

In a recent Instagram LIVE‘, Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri shared that video is “driving an immense amount of growth online for all major platforms” and stated that video will be a key focus area for Instagram over the coming months. 

The key takeaway from this is that if you want to grow online, YOU NEED TO START POSTING VIDEO CONTENT.  

The same goes for other social media platforms. What do you see as soon as you log in to any social media platform? We’ll guess that it’s a video. This is because video content typically performs BEST with most algorithms, based on the fact it captures a viewer’s attention for longer.  

Videos are growing in popularity across all channels, and it’s a fact that they get more exposure and engagement than other forms of content. We suggest that you use video wherever possible. 

DO keep your branding consistent 

Make sure you maintain brand consistency across all your social media channels, including logos, names and colours, to ensure your customers always know it’s you no matter where they are.  

DO analyse and track activity 

Social media analytics will help identify the posts that generate the most interactions. By studying posts, you can optimise your content, try to emulate the results, or even adjust them to improve the results. Cool right?! 

There are multiple tools that can be used by your business to monitor your activity, but you can also use the built-in analytics tools on the individual platforms.  

So now, here are some of the main areas to avoid… 

The DONT’s of Social Media 

DON’T fall for trolls 

It’s easy to fall victim to rude or patronizing comments, but it is not worth jeopardising your business’s reputation. Keep your personal and business thoughts and ideas separate.  

Treat a social media user as you would an upset customer in your business, give them excellent customer service and offer ways to resolve their issues. 

Click here to learn about how our own Andrea Warner deals with trolls and negative comments. 

DON’T forget to do a spelling and grammar check 

When promoting your business online, brand perception is everything. You don’t want a customer’s first impression of your business to be tainted because of improper grammar and spelling.  

To avoid this, re-read and edit your posts before you send them out. Even better, get a trusted colleague to proof-read posts, two sets of eyes are better than one!  

If you are still on the fence about something, there are many different free online grammar and spelling checks like Grammarly for you to use to fine-tune those posts. 

DON’T overdo it 

Posting too often on your business social profiles can be just as harmful as not posting often enough.  

According to research by Sprout Social, 46% of social media users will unfollow a brand for posting too many promotional messages on their profiles, which means you need to restrict your output or risk losing customers (by promotional we mean selling yourself rather than just creating engaging content for your target customer). 

Some of the best posts from companies are informative and fun rather than promoting a product, everyone has oodles of personality…use it for good! 

DON’T get hung up on numbers   

And finally, you should never get too fixated on numbers when it comes to your business social media profiles.  

Business owners tend to lose sleep over not having as many Facebook fans or Twitter followers as they’d like but, while these metrics are certainly important, they’re not the be-all and end-all.  

This is where quality over quantity really comes into play. You could have 10,000 followers, but if half are spam accounts, then your messages will be falling on deaf ears.  

Often the real value is found in the amount of engagement you’re receiving, and the type of people you’re receiving it from. These are the things that can make you the real money, so pay more attention to these instead. 

Want to up your social media game but aren’t sure where to start?  

We can help with that. Book a discovery call now with CREATIVE in TiME, let our marketing agency help your business. 

By Fred Warner

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