You know how your website is all about conversion rates? You want every visitor to become an instantaneous customer, so you have strong copywriting to sell your services/products and plenty of calls to action. However, with social media, if you attempt this same strategy, you are seriously missing the mark. So what is the right approach for these popular platforms? Read on.
The social media Secret
First, the purpose of social media is to engage your followers. Interact with them. Get them to like you and trust you. That’s it. Of course, you eventually want them to become a customer, and guess what happens when they like and trust you? They buy from you! It doesn’t matter if you’re posting on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even Pinterest or Instagram, your content really needs to pack a punch. Here are some ways to do that:
- Be Relevant. Does your target audience even care about what you are posting?
- Be Helpful. Is there something new you can teach them that will improve their life?
- Be Funny. Everyone likes to laugh, and sometimes, that’s all you need to provide.
- Be Simple. People don’t read through their news feeds with a dictionary in tow. Make sure the language you use is understandable by the masses.
- Be Friendly. Always. On any post, comment, question, etc. If people don’t like you, they certainly won’t buy from you.
- Be Sharable. This is the most important of them all. When content gets shared, new people are introduced to your brand, which is exactly what you want. Having some of your content go viral is the quickest way to increase your followers. Before you post anything, ask yourself this question: If you saw your content, would you be inclined to pass it along to friends and family?
The Nitty Gritty
Okay, now that you know what you need to post, you probably want to know how often you should post it. Unfortunately, this answer is not one-size-fits-all. Every platform works differently, and if you mix up the frequencies, you are doomed for failure.
- Facebook – Since the Facebook news feed is slow-moving, you never want to post more than twice per day. In fact, once per day is usually sufficient. However, you don’t want to skip a day (no, not even on the weekends), or you could lose relevancy with your fans. NOTE: Posts that include photos are historically more popular than simple text posts. When uploading a photo to your news feed, 470 x 394 pixels is ideal. For your profile photo, you will want an image that is 180 x 180, and your cover photo should be 849 x 313.
- Twitter – Quite the opposite of Facebook, the Twitter news feed is constantly moving. You can actually post as much as 14 times per day, as long as you don’t do more than one in an hour. Just aim for 120 characters or less (140 is the max) so that people can retweet your content without having to edit it first. For Twitter, your header and profile pictures are extremely important because they are heavily featured on Twitter’s mobile app. The header image should be 590 x 295 pixels, and the profile picture should be 73 x 73.
- LinkedIn – LinkedIn is the only one of these three main social media platforms that doesn’t get much traffic on weekends, so you don’t need to worry about posting on Saturday or Sunday. However, you should still post once per day during the week, with morning time being ideal. The only real image you need here is your profile picture, which needs to be less than 500 x 500 pixels and 4 MB in size.