In a time starved day, how much time should you devote to social media? The following suggestions are the MUST do social media best practices for business. It’s hard to know where to commit time and where to save time, but still deliver results. We’ve put our money where our mouth is and chosen the social media best practices for your business. Whether you’re hoping to boost your SEO (search engine optimization), increase your brand awareness, increase visits to your website or increase sales – this post has something for everyone. We refer to apps and tools below to help you save time. Please contact us if you want some coaching on how to best use them; it’s our favourite thing to do. 

For all businesses we used to tell our clients to set up a Google+ page, but this has changed. It’s now more important to set up a Google My Business page instead. Google My Business is Google’s new ‘dashboard’ for managing your Google properties. In addition to providing the information for your Local Search listing (replacing GooglePlaces), the Google My Business page connects you to your Google+ Page, Google Analytics, and Adwords Express.

There is a new feature rolled out in 2017 and you can now post in Google My Business post. Google introduces a handful of ways businesses can use posts, but there’s plenty of room for more creativity:

Your posts will then have a chance to show up for Google search as well as Google Maps, depending on the nature of the query and the nature of the post.

You can also add events. The event posts will stay current until the event day has passed, while the other promotional posts will only last one week. The premise is this increased action on Google will help your SER (search engine ranking). Don’t forget to update your business hours, location or any other seasonal information. 

For all Businesses

 

How does a business manage their Facebook account without Business Manager, Ads manager and all the other tools you have available to you within this platform? If you’re managing multiple Facebook accounts, you are required by law to manage them from within the Facebook Business Manager. 

Business Manager is a free Facebook platform that helps advertisers integrate Facebook marketing efforts across their business and with external partners. With Business Manager, you’ll be able to run and track your ads, manage assets such as your Pages and ad accounts, and add an agencies or marketing partners to help manage your business.

Create a Business Manager if:

To set up Business Manager follow the instructions provided by Facebook Help Centre. 

 

 

 

 

We all do! Editorial Calendar and Content Bank

 

An editorial calendar is used by bloggers, publishers, businesses, and groups to control publication of content across different media, for example, newspaper, magazine, blog, email newsletters, and social media outlets.

Get a four-month calendar (or use a digital one) and start plotting any important events, dates, promotions, holidays, campaigns, and seasonal activities where appropriate. 

Then start overlaying some of the items you might want to promote in the next months. Strategically, look at your events or promotions and how long in advance you need to promote them. You may need videos or images created for these promotions or campaigns. Keep track of those items and make a running to do list for these items in your editorial calendar. 

You’ll find a sample editorial calendar template here from Coschedule, you can customize it however you like.

Next, build your content bank around your editorial calendar. A content bank is a bank of posts which contains all your messaging for social media. You will have several columns that include date, message, image/video, link, which platforms it should be posted on and any tagging information. We suggest building your content for 30 days at a time. 

By planning your editorial calendar and content bank in advance, you will have a better sense of what is coming up and hopefully the panic about social media subsides! We’ve given our friends (that’s you!) a free content bank here.
 

You do. So start scheduling!

This is the biggest time saver. You know that sticking to a schedule is important for your business.

If you don’t have a social media plan and posts scheduled to role out while your sipping a cappuccino on a Tuesday afternoon, you’re missing out on engagement, time savings  and placing a lot of undue stress on yourself. 

Here’s what happens if you don’t schedule your posts. 
Now is the perfect time to post, but you don’t have anything prepared. You stop what you’re doing and go into panic mode. You want to find the right piece of content to post, and fast.You jump over to Twitter and check out the influencers on your Twitter lists. What are they posting about? You check the trending topics. 10-15 minutes later you decide on the perfect piece of content for your Facebook audience — and you post it. Whew! Sound familiar? We’ve all been there.
It’s that, “fire fire!!” feeling that comes from not preparing your social media content in advance.  In addition to the negative feelings, you lose the overall advantage of following a strategy or social media plan and as a result you don’t consider your business goals. 

 

There are some amazing time-saving tools for the time-starved social media manager. These are the tools we use, and you should too.

Download here the Best social media tools

A must for all businesses

Facebook and Instagram campaign management is becoming ever more complex for any businesses. Use Google Analytics and Statscounter in conjunction with the analytics tools available innately in each social media platform to determine what’s working and what’s not. Any small business Facebook campaign should be bringing 300-400 clients to your website weekly for about a $100 CAD, if you are setting it up correctly. If you’re spending more than that for CPC, you need to work harder on who your audience is and tweaking your creative and messaging to suit the client you’re after. 

We love Klipfolio for analytics and we set it up so our clients can log in and review their analytics dashboard 24 hours a day. 

 

The outcome? You can determine who is clicking your links, coming to your website, what their demographic/interests/behaviours are. And using Statscounter, you can determine their IP address, what type of phone they are using and more. 

 

Time to set up 
It’s probably best to hire someone for this step. It’s very important to get right and it does take quite a bit of time. I’ve screwed it up more times like I like to admit. And once it’s up and running it will be working for you, saving you time and stress, and optimizing your social media.

 

 

If you’re a business the above things are MUST do’s for 2018. These are not optional items for a business of any size. Social Media is a bit like a piece of string, how long do you want it to be? Don’t feel overwhelmed, just start somewhere. Start with the tips above and you’ll be five steps further in the right direction. If you’ve got the above nailed check out Turn 2018 Social Media Predictions into Actionable Items .

 

Happy posting!

CarmellaCrew