Social media best practices

Image courtesy of: (blog.taigacompany.com)

Some of the best practices for Instagram include:

-           Complete your biography

People want to know who you are!

-           Link your Instagram account to your other social media accounts

This will allow your friends to be aware that you have joined Instagram and allow you to share your pictures on other platforms. For business, by doing this your customer base can expand as you are given exposure across multiple platforms.

-          Be unique

Post photos on Instagram that cannot be found anywhere else. This makes people join the site, makes them unique and more sought after and makes people want to join Instagram.

-          Community

Engage with the Instagram community. Find people to follow and add comments to your photographs and post comments. Ask users to add hashtags to their photographs. By doing this you have a greater chance of connecting with Instagram users who share your interests.

-          Content

From a business perspective keeping your content up to date is really important as it keeps your users engaged. So it is important to keep posting photos on a regular basis. The same can be said from a personal basis to keep your followers engaged.

  

-      Express yourself  

  

Per Instagram-business.tumblr.com; “the photos you post tell a story about your brand. Users can tell when you’ve put thought into every photo you post. Being authentic about the content you share will help you build genuine connections with your followers.”

     -      Posting

Post often and as much as you like. As per maximisesocialbusiness.com; “No one likes a lazy account. Posting once a month is not a successful Instagram strategy. Depending on your business and your strategy, you may post as many as 3-5 times a day or you may only post a couple times a week. Determine a schedule works for you and your brand. And then stick to it!”

Some of the best practices for LinkedIn include:

-          Complete your profile

 As Forbes.com says; “Nothing screams “Rookie” like an unfinished profile. Take the time and get it done, both for yourself and your company. There are a few other essentials to getting started. A new book called The LinkedIn Essentials by Asia Bird is helpful, as is the eBook How to Use LinkedIn for Business by Hubspot.”

-                        -      Keeping your profile up to date:

By doing this it reflects you’re most recent job experience, your most current position, academic qualifications etc.     

       

       -      Update your statues regularly

By doing so, you share your updated content with your network. Your network will then update and remind everyone who is a member of it about you. 

-                      -      Link your status to your other social media accounts

Per ezinarticles.com this will result in “For a businessman, a top of mind awareness is very important that is why this is considered one of the LinkedIn best practices. This lets them know that you are active in promoting business and spreading some helpful news or articles. It also helps in increasing incoming leads as well as exposure for your brand or business.”

-          Join and follow groups and participate in them

As a member of LinkedIn you can join innumerate groups to what are the user’s preferences. By doing so this builds your profile and lets you share content with them. The more active you are with these groups the more you build trust with these groups.

-          Keep your network up to date

Continuous review of your network will ensure you add new and remove people and ensure you are connected as best as possible. 

     -         Applications

By using LinkedIn apps this will help enrich your profile on the site and allow to share with your network, Apps include Inmail where LinkedIn guarantees a a response through a request for introduction, or they give you a credit to use another InMail.

Instagram Best Practices

http://instagram-business.tumblr.com/post/29441248656/instagram-best-practices-to-see-more-tips-and

Instagram Best Practices

http://maximizesocialbusiness.com/instagram-best-practices-10548/

LinkedIn Best Practices

http://EzineArticles.com/6949093

27 LinkedIn Tips: LinkedIn Best Practices For Entrepreneurs

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkrogue/2012/06/29/27-linkedin-tips-linkedin-best-practices-for-entrepreneurs/

How is Social Media activity measured?

(Image courtesy www.in-tuition.ie)

The question is a very good one. Obviously beyond the likes on Facebook and the follows on Twitter for example other activity is measured to determine the success of a small campaign. This activity is vital to companies for future strategy to allow them to adjust it or to scrap it and start again.

Looking at libraries for example ( but can apply across all industries) per infotoday.com "While trying to arrive at a workable means of measuring success with social media, you might benefit from applying the Trinity Approach for web analytics developed by Avinash Kaushik (www.kaushik.net/avinash/2006/08/trinity-a-mindset-strategic-approach.html). It arrives at actionable insights by focusing on three components:

1. Behavioral Data: This is the “what” of user behavior that librarians are used to collecting. How many blog posts? How many readers? What did the user do?

2. Outcome: This is the “so what” that gets to the heart of why you have an online presence. Take a look at your social pages and ask “so what?” Have your users and your library benefited? Have users found your applications and services useful and valuable? Are they more satisfied?

3. Experience: This is the “why they do it” question. At its most basic level, this is about listening to the voices of our users. What are they telling us? How are they experiencing our social media content and online services? We should invite comments and respond honestly, conduct surveys and act on the results, and let users help design our websites. By finding out “why they do it,” we can design and implement social media projects that result in optimal user behaviors and in win-win situations."

Monitoring the data is vitally important. To know what is the outcome of the company’s campaign, to be able to see the raw data, take the results on board and adjust going forward or start again. There is a lot of money tied up in such social media campaigns and if they "fall flat on their face" people are to be blamed and strategies need readjusting. There are various tools out there to allow this to happen. 

Hootsuite for example allows you to have several platforms on one dashboard and allows you to track tweets and posts and provides software to record and view statistics. Another piece of software available is Ubrvu which was acquired in January 2014 by Hootsuite. Per HOotsuite"uberVU’s product is a next-generation social analytics solution that turns data from blogs, forums and social networks into actionable business insightsuberVU helps businesses better understand their social audience by identifying key influencers on relevant topics, easily detecting real-time spikes in engagement (with insights on sentiment, location, and demographics), and highlighting important mentions." Even at a basic level seeing the number of likes on your Facebook page, or customer responses or the lack of response to a post will give you feels you can analyze and use going forward.

Knowing your audience is vitally important and trying to keep track of it is also important. In the company I work for we welcome comments on our twitter page and our Facebook page and we respond to them accordingly. Even in the digital age knowing your customer has not changed. It is vital to the success of a company and without them and adjusting your company’s needs accordingly a company will not get very far. 

http://blog.ubervu.com/ubervu-joining-forces-hootsuite.html