There’s no shortage of tips nor advice when it comes to social media “best practices”. If I had to boil it down to only 5 rules, these are the 5 social media rules I would choose.
- Consistency is key! To truly maximize the bang you get for your social media buck, it’s crucial to have a steady, consistent level of activity on all of your brand’s social media accounts. You have no control over how a customer will first come in contact with your brand. If you haven’t tweeted for the past 4 weeks, that first impression isn’t going to be a good one. Also, one part of Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm is “affinity”, which is a measure of how much a user interacts with another user or fan page. If your Facebook activity drops off, your fans’ affinity will drop off, too, decreasing the likelihood they are shown your updates once you start posting again.
- The 80/20 Rule Social media is not meant to be used to blast your message all day, every day. Talk about anything but your brand and its product or services about 80% of the time. This rule is essential for building a community and strong level of social media engagement.
- “Relevant & Complementary” This is my personal social media content mantra. Come up with a list of topics that are relevant to your customers, then use it as a guide to formulate your content strategy. Using some of your updates to promote other businesses is a great idea, too.
- Follow-up with commenters & questions Not doing so is the equivalent of ignoring customers who enter your store, never answering your phone and never responding to your business email. You wouldn’t do that “in real life”, so you shouldn’t do that online either.
- Don’t be afraid to show personality Sure, you’re tweeting and posting as your brand, but that doesn’t mean you have to be stiff nor “All Business, All the Time”. Social media is meant to be social! Plus, showing some personality helps to humanize your brand. This is especially important if you use your business logo as your avatar for all social accounts. It’ll be easier to garner follow-backs if other users realize there’s a real person talking to them instead of a brand.
How would your top 5 rules differ?
*Photo credit Vacant Fever
Thanks for this post, it truly re-enforced a lot of what I believe and will make me work more on task to continue to improve my own site.
Great and useful post Liz. Down here in Australia, digital agencys use the 1/5 rule in posting messages about our brand. For every 5 posts, only one of them should talk about our clients brands. Its exactly like your pareto 80/20 rule explained differently.
Funny how societies and cultures may differ, but their concepts are the same.