If your company is new to marketing on social media platforms, it can take a little while to learn the ropes. Working out a presence as a brand online is very different from using the site in a personal capacity, and both of those are a world apart from managing stand-alone digital resources like your website and mailing list. It’s important that all these aspects of your digital marketing interface, but that doesn’t mean the same strategies for success work across all of them.
The first thing to remember is that each platform works differently. The algorithms that determine visibility are not only proprietary and differently weighted, they are built to different purposes. Platforms like Instagram favor visual communication and minimize the importance of the textual content without removing it. By contrast, Facebook is always shifting its approach, favoring video at some points, images at others, and links to off-site resources at times as well. Staying on top of those changes is what you need to understand what your most effective post styles of the moment will be for each platform.
It’s also important to remember that your social media is not just a marketing tool, it’s also a point of contact for customer service, and a very public one. Not only does the private messaging function on most sites work a lot like email, the interactions on your public-facing posts are also customer service moments. Whether it’s answering questions about your products or addressing concerns raised by customers who have interacted with your company in the past, the way you handle those visible cases will spread on sites designed to telegraph information based on the level of engagement it gets.
This double-edged nature of interaction on the site means that when you handle customer service moments well and reach a satisfactory outcome, the thanks you get will spread just as far as any negative feedback that corresponds to missteps. As a result, your most seasoned customer service professionals should be taking care of the messaging to individual customers, even if you have other staff writing the posts that are meant to convey more detailed content, like blogs and infographics. Remember, as a brand you do not need to designate just one person to manage the profile, either. You can put together a team to ensure each aspect of your social media management is handled by the best person for the job, inside or outside your core staff.