WEEK 3: SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT MANAGEMENT

3.1 Identify What to Post

Engaging social media content typically falls into either one of three categories.
1. Posts that are educational, that teach, update, or inform.
2. Posts that are inspirational and feel good, or that move people to act.
3. Posts that are fun and entertaining and that present a brand in human and spirited way.

As a first step in thinking about your social media content, think about these categories and whether you
can create content that falls into either one of them.

Before you start creating content, it's good to reflect on the format of your posts.

TWO TYPES OF CONTENT:

 Organic content, which is content created for posts and tweets and where you interact with your
audience like a fellow user. You can build engagement and conversation through organic content,
it's also free.
 Paid content, like an ad or a paid sponsorship that specifically targets certain demographics and
will appear in users feeds who meet your criteria.

But for social media, which is based on social interactions, having only paid content might not be the right
approach.

The challenge is to come up with unique content for your audience, different ways of telling
stories, and in different formats.

 share content from your website,

 create a behind the scenes video,
 showcase employees or members of your audience,
 promote upcoming events,
 create content around holidays or events,
 make a tutorial video,
 engage your audience with a question,
 have a giveaway or a contest,
 contribute to a hashtag challenge,
 post inspirational quotes,
 go live,
 showcase a new product

The important thing is to remember to try different topics as sticking to one type of post will get old
quickly.

Curating content created by other people that you can share with your audience is an important
part of your content strategy. This can be articles, news updates, stories, videos, infographics, really
anything, and it can come from websites, other social media accounts, or users.

Why You Should Curate Content?

 It shows that you're in the conversation on social media and sharing and commenting
creates the interlocking nature of social media.
 Shows you know what's going on in your industry and positions you as an authority if you
share valuable content about the industry to your users.
 Show other businesses or organizations in your industry that you are there and they may
share your content in return, which is a way to grow your audience.
 It takes the pressure off you having to create more content.

Curating content to share takes some effort as you do need to keep on top of who's posting what in your
industry.

For example, a bookstore may share other bookstore's recommendations, or a publishing house may
share content from the New York Review of Books, for instance, or other literary websites and
organizations.

Other Tips:
 Keep an eye on news, magazines, and newsletters.
 Set Google Alerts to flag you for content,

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  Use a curation app like Feedly or Pocket to gather different articles and posts you want to share

When you do share a piece of content, don't just put it out there without context, write why you like it,
quote it or ask a question about it, and don't forget to tag the content creators. This shows you know how
social media works and that you want to start a conversation.

Part of your curated content should also be sharing what your audience is doing or sharing customer
generated content.
 By sharing their content, you show that you're paying attention to your followers and add a little
humanity to your brand by showing your brand's greater culture.

Don't forget that if you're stuck for ideas, you can always repurpose content as well. Go back to some old
blog posts or articles and repromote them. Have a report that your business generated last year, pull out
some nuggets and create content around them.

3.2 Topics to Post About

Share a content from your website like a blog post, an article, or a podcast. It's useful information your
audience would be interested in. Share it, write a summary, and include the link or instead of a summary,
take a quote from the post you're linking to.

Behind-the-Scenes. Give a tour of your stock room or your kitchen, for instance. Show behind the
scenes of how you're putting together an upcoming event. Show a day in a life of an employee, so that
your audience can get a feel for the other side of your business. Do your behind the scenes video on live.

Feature employees. Show them in your post at work, have them showcase a product or service to your
audience or have one of them do social media takeover for the day.

Upcoming events. Create your event on Facebook as many businesses are using Facebook Events like
an events calendar. Whether they're very active on Facebook or not, build excitement by dripping out
posts about your event across your social media channels, like interviews with participants, link to articles
or information about participants or a giveaway or promo if there are tickets involved.

Create pieces of content around upcoming holidays or special events like the Super Bowl or
Election day. Be sure to keep up on special days in your industry like National Ice Cream Day or
Independent Bookstore Day. Take a note of these days and add them to your content calendar to make
sure you don't miss out.

If you have a product or service you offer, make a tutorial video showing how it's used or how it
works. Like using an app to order a rideshare, making a food box recipe or showing what workouts are
like at the new gym. You never know who's been reluctant to use your product because they just didn't
know how it worked.

Ask your audience a question to get them engaged, prompt them to reply in the comments, take a poll
or do some trivia. This builds audience interaction and can start some fun conversation, but make sure
that you're around to respond to the comments.

Go live and do an AMA or ask-me-anything and your audience can post their thoughts in real-time.

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Hold a giveaway or contest through your social media channels. Encourage your audience not just
to submit their entry, but to submit some original content, like a photo with your product that you might be
able to use for future promotions. Create a hashtag around to contest or create a promo code just for a
specific channels’ audience.

Create content around a popular hashtag like Throwback Thursday or Motivational Monday, which are
hashtags and content people look for and expect. Participate in a hashtag challenge on TikTok, for
example, or create your own.

Use report or whitepaper with industry information that may be interesting to your audience. Post
some charts or infographics to catch their attention. Share quotes from the report or encourage people to
check it out with a, "did you know?" question.

Relate to trends. Be aware of any trends in the social media space, which could be as small as a popular
hashtag or as big as responding to a major societal event. Join the conversation with questions,
educational materials, or affirmations. Providing resources and comments on industry can also position
you as a leader in the space.

Pose some inspirational quotes for your audience. You can do it simply through text or use an app
like Canva, for instance, to create a text image which will stand out even more on image-heavy platforms.

Showcase your customers, feature a customer of the week or month, and share their story with your
audience or have a customer give a testimonial about your product or service that you can share as well.

Partner with Influencers. Create some sponsored content with them or have them do a social media
takeover of your accounts for the day so their audience can get exposed to your business.

New product introductions. Be sure to showcase it with storytelling. Tell your audience about the
problem you were looking to solve and how this new product solved that problem.

Use humor and levity. Employ some witty banter with other businesses as well to show that your brand
knows how to have a little fun and take a joke.

Pop culture. It may seem odd to post about the new album, TV show, or video game when your business
doesn't relate to any of those. But it shows that you as a brand are up to date on the things that your
audience is interested in. Plus, it gives you some human credibility.

Share curated content like articles, blog posts, and other valuable content that other businesses,
organizations, and thought leaders in your industry have shared. This not only shows you're paying
attention to your industry, but by being a source of information, it positions you as an authority, can also
expand your audience and you can build relationships with the businesses whose content you shared.

Share customer-generated content.

Resharing can show everyday use of your product or service. It also tells the story of your brand through
your customers or users, not just from you alone.

Repurpose content. Point people back to still relevant content to repurpose it or take older content and
chunk it up into new Top 10 list posts or other tips, tricks, and tidbits that you can use. Have an archive,
dig some interesting content out for your audience.

Point your audience to a favorite cause or charity your business cares about. Post their story or
partner with them to create some original content. It not only shows that your business likes to give back,
but it also creates a new audience for the cause or charity.

Thank your audience when you hit a follower’s milestone or after a campaign. A little gratitude goes
along, especially in showing your audience that your brand is made up of people who are grateful for the
audience. Throw in an impromptu promo code as a thank you gift.

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Just sell something. Post a product or service you offer with a link to purchase it. Social media platforms
are beginning to add purchase buttons to their posts so that followers can be taken directly to a purchase
page to buy.

3.3 Using Storyboards to Plan Your Content

Animator Webb Smith is credited with creating the first storyboard, which were simple sketches, laying out
the scenes of a cartoon pinned to a board on the wall, a technique of planning out content that Disney
would embrace.

A storyboard is simply a visual outline of your story, sketched across a series of blocks or boxes
arranged in order of the story you want to tell. Consider it like a comic strip for your content or a
blueprint for what you're going to create.
 A storyboard is also a great way to see if your story or concepts will work before you commit time,
money, and energy to make it.
 If it doesn't work in your storyboard, you can literally go back to the drawing board and
reorganize, rewrite, or recreate.

Storyboarding is going to be a great tool as you plan out your video content so you can see which:
 shots to set-up
 camera angles to use
 how to create your story arc.

Storyboards are also useful for something like Instagram or Facebook stories, where you can string
multiple videos or images together into a narrative arc.

If you have multiple single image posts as part of a campaign, you can storyboard those as well to
make sure your content makes sense and aligns, even if they're being posted at different times across
different platforms.

3.4 Creating a Storyboard

The first thing to determine when starting to storyboard is our engagement goal for our social media
post. Do we want to educate our audience? Do we want to increase traffic to our website, or do we want
to make a sale?

Also, what story are we going to tell? so for this storyboard, we're going to have education, inspiration,
and purchase in mind.

Maybe you want to include some voice-over to the videos. We can start drafting the script in our
storyboard as well. In remembering that most videos are playing without sound, not having a voice-over is
probably good idea.

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  Let's make text to go in the video instead. In addition to the text, we want to add some stickers on
those videos.
 Let's include that in our storyboard as well, so we don't forget.
 Let's add our logo in the bottom right corner of each video too.
 Let's include any hashtags we want to include, draft our call to action language, and make sure
we have the right link.

Storyboard Benefits
 Brainstorm. If something's not working, or if you need to rearrange sections, you can do so
easily. Also, storyboarding helps you flesh out new ideas that haven't fully formed yet.
 Visualize. Storyboarding allows you to picture what your content will look like, and how it will
present before you start creating it.
 Create great content. By planning out your content with the storyboard, you're committing to
creating deliberate, thoughtful, well-put-together work that your audience will notice. If you begin
to be recognized for your excellent content, you'll build trust and gain followers.
 Remember key elements. Storyboarding is also a way to capture tiny elements you may forget
when posting on the fly, like stickers you want to add hashtags, location tags, mentions, and
others.
 Collaboration. If you need to pitch social media stories to a marketing director or editor, it's also
a great way to show them visually what you're thinking about.
 Templating. You can turn storyboards into templates for future content. So you're not starting
from the ground up each time.

3.5 What Makes Content Viral

Six Things to Do to Help You Go Viral

1. Create “social currency” content. Most people on social media want to seem smart, cultured,
and ethical. You should give them content that helps them do that. They may be more inclined to
share that content because it makes them look good.
2. Use a sensory “trigger.” This is something that makes people immediately think of your product
when they see, hear, smell, or touch it.
3. Evoke emotion. The emotion could be happiness, sadness, or even anger.
4. Make your brand as public as possible. Try to find a uniquely distinct brand logo and coloration
that maximizes your publicity. That way, people will know your product is yours whenever they
use or talk about it.
5. Make your content practical.
6. Tell a story. Ads and content that tell a story are more likely to be shared and they can be even
more powerful if they invite people to share their own story.

3.6 Using a Content Calendar

If you want to have a plan of execution use a content calendar, a calendar where you fill in upcoming
events for your social media platforms when they are going to be posted and where. Without a calendar
you will be scrambling to post content in real time, racking your brain for something relevant, and unaware
that it may need to tie into previous posts or created campaigns.

One of the primary reasons to post on social media is for customer engagement which furthers your
brands increases trust, provides something of value for your followers, and turns them into fans.

BENEFITS OF HAVING A CONTENT CALENDAR

 Organization. It allows you the time to be more thoughtful about your posts, and to map them as
greater content strategy as well.
 Consistent brand voice. Since you can see a few weeks or months in advance, having a
content calendar will help you keep consistency in your brand voice. You'll probably be writing
multiple posts at once, or batching, which will guarantee they'll be written in the same voice. You
can review upcoming posts, and if one doesn't align with your brand voice, you can pull it or
revise it.
 Plan for events, holidays, or special occasions. Mark major holidays or holidays that might be
important to your industry so that you can plan content around that day and have the time to
create it well before it needs to go live. If something pops up that you want to post about, you
know which post you can reschedule for another time, and which need to stay to correspond with
a specific date.
 Fill in the gaps. Having a content calendar that shows what's being posted when will help you
see any gaps you may have in scheduled posts, or if there are too many posts at one time, for
instance.

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  Collaboration across the team. Team members will be able to see what social media posts are
coming up and could make suggestions for posts of their own or add to posts already created.
The team can staff social media channels for replies and monitor call to action responses
generated by the post.

Content Calendar includes:

 Content you are sharing with your audience. You should include anything that's going live to your
followers like the post's contents, any images or videos that go with it, any links you may include,
and any hashtags you're using.
 Which platform and format? You also want to include any information you want to track, such as
which platform it's on, whether it's an ad or original content, or reshare or curated content and so
on.
 Date and time.

3.7 Creating a Content Calendar

It's a great idea to note ideas in your calendar somewhere, so that you keep everything in one place and
anyone in your team that has access to your calendar can add to it as well.

The simplest way to create a content calendar is in a simple spreadsheet like Google Sheets or Excel,
for instance.

Steps
Open up a new spreadsheet, before we start laying out a calendar, lets designate one of the sheets as
content ideas.

We know right from the start that we want informational content, inspirational content, and
fun/entertaining content. But you also want to remember to include content that tells our audience about
our services and any events we may have coming up.

While this brainstorming isn't our content calendar, you can start to see what kinds of ideas you must use
and what platforms might be best suited for them. And this is a good place for other members in the team
to park their ideas as well.

 First, the date and any special holiday or event I need to keep in mind.
 Second, the content ideas. I like to split them in ideas that relate to a certain day or time of year
and evergreen content. That way, if I need to cut anything or shift anything around, I know which
content is easier to reschedule.
 I like to keep a row per platform where I'm active.

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Let's go through and add national Holidays, so we can create content around them.

Since national pet month is sponsored by the American Veterinary Medical Association, lets pair up with
a local veterinary office to create a month's worth of content.

We'll feature healthy tips and advice, which may be text based and good for Twitter or Facebook. We'll
also feature interviews and videos from the vets, which would be good for Instagram, Twitter, or
Facebook. Inspirational stories will be good for Instagram and Facebook.

Studies show that a business should post once a day on Facebook, 15 times per day on Twitter,
11 times per day on Pinterest, and once or twice per day on Instagram.

3 Things to Remember:
 Posts should be consistent and frequent. Just make sure social media posts are consistent
and frequent enough for steady engagement.
 Posts may be curated. Many of those posts will be curated content shared from other sites,
other industry leaders, and from individual followers themselves.
 Posts can be repurposed. Carlos could create a post for Facebook that's a summary of his blog
post. He could take the video from his blog post and use it for an Instagram post with a caption, a
quote from the post instead of a summary. And he could break the post down into 10 tips or 10
quotes to post throughout the day on Twitter.

By planning out our content, we've saved time and stress because we won't be scrambling to create
posts, we don't have to worry about missing milestones or holidays.

3.8 Repurposing Content

Repurposing content is simply the idea that no piece of content is ever, "One and done."

Your content is full of ideas, stories, stats, and information that can be presented again in different
formats, which can appeal to new audiences and expand your reach.

For instance, take some of the stats you found and create an infographic, or a series of tweets, or pull a
quote and make an image, turn the contents into a presentation or an informative video. If your post has
great insights, update the data in the future, and share it all over again.

What Content Should You Repurpose?

1. Evergreen content or content that is useful, interesting, and impactful year after year. This kind
of content is always relevant to your audience, so it's a great place to mine ideas for repurposing.
It could be:
 a how to guide,
 a report,
 an overview of a certain topic or industry.
2. Timely or time-stamped content or content that responded to a trend or a news cycle, like a
guide to new tech in 2015, or new movies in 2018, which would now be outdated, of course. But
you can always use these kinds of posts to inspire new posts like, new tech for next year, for
instance.
3. Popular content. Seek out your most popular content by looking at your engagement analytics.
Find your social media posts that did well, the ones that got lots of likes and comments, for
instance and think about how you can repurpose them.

Few Ways to Repurpose Content

You created a step-by-step tutorial for your blog on how to set up a simple website and you share that
link with your audience.
 That tutorial could easily turn into slide deck, which you could post on LinkedIn.
 Take the slide deck and add a voice over or use the texts from your blog posts to narrate a
screen cap and share that to YouTube.
 Take clips of the YouTube video and share them as a teaser or lead generator on Instagram.
 Take the steps in your tutorial and create a tweets thread with those steps on Twitter.
 Finally, make an infographic to post on Pinterest.

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In each of these situations, you can also tweak your caption for each platform to appeal to that platform's
audience.

Benefits to Repurposing Content

1. Stretches the value. Start viewing content in terms of ideas that can be communicated in many
different formats.
2. Play to platforms strength. Like creating a presentation for LinkedIn, an instructional video for
YouTube, or an infographic for Pinterest.
3. Expand your audience. Repurposing content into different formats also exposes your ideas and
findings to an expanded audience who may not
consume content in one format but may devour it
in another.
4. Reinforce your message. By spreading your
ideas through repurposed content, you're
repeating and reinforcing the message you're
trying to communicate with your audience. Seeing
your message in one place may not make an
impact, but repeatedly, seeing it in various
formats will.
5. More social media posts. More content means
more frequent posting about it, which can round
out your content calendar. If your audience sees
you posting pieces of quality content consistently
and frequently, it keeps you present in their feed
and top of mind.
6. Position as an authority.
7. Audience format preference. Have you been
writing blog posts, but find that your audience is
paying far more attention to a podcast created
from that blog post, now you know where to focus
your future content creation efforts.
8. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Advantages. Since repurposed content contains
the same keywords, you'll increase your brand's
association with those keywords in search,
increasing the probability that your content will
come up in search results for those keywords. If
your content references other websites or studies,
repurposed content will increase your opportunity
to link, which is another way to improve your
search rankings.
9. Saves you time.

3.9 Auditing Content

If a particular topic or format resonates with your audience, you want to create more content
along the same line. If your audience doesn't like a particular topic or format, you want to redirect your
effort.

An audit is simply a detailed list of what content you have and the engagement metrics associated
with each piece of content like how many likes, shares and comments each piece received. Then
you can analyze your numbers, pick out patterns, rate your content and make data-driven plans for your
content going forward.

Benefits of a Content Audit:

 Better oversight.
 Identify valuable content.
 Find trends in engagement
 Make improvements
 Assess target audience

Some businesses will conduct a full audit once a year, when they go to update static pages. Others will
do a monthly or even weekly audit to keep a closer hand on their content engagement. It's going to be up
to your business cycles, what you want to track and how often, but I suggest you evaluate your social
media content at least monthly.

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Setting Up Spreadsheet for Content Audit
1. Populate your content into one list. This is going to include static pages, blog posts, videos,
digital downloads, any asset on your sites that your audience engages with. You'll want to record
the title and URL at the very least and date of creation, author, last update, topic or theme,
whether there are images or videos on the page and any other notes that will be helpful to you.
2. If your website has a content management system or CMS on the backend, use that to get a list
of your content. Additionally, there are third party websites that can crawl your site and set you up
with a list. Screaming Frog is such a crawler.
3. Collect your metrics. Your business may have internal analytics set up on your website, or you
can get these through Google Analytics. Google Analytics will track and report all the user
interactions with your website.
4. Remember that while Analytics can track all metrics, not all metrics are going to be useful to you.
Typically, the most helpful metrics for content are the number of visits and the number of visitors,
as well as the time spent on a page.
5. As you're adding these metrics, you may want to organize them by months, so you can keep
track of how your content is performing from month to month.
6. Now, you can just compile this massive resource of data and just let it sit there.

 Do you see that visitors stay on certain blog posts longer? Look into what topics those blog posts
cover and focus more on those topics in the future.
 Do visitors stay on pages longer that contain images? Use more images.
 Once you've looked through your data and uncovered patterns, you can take action.

7. You can even go through and rate each piece of content on a scale, so you can keep the top-
rated content, update mediocre contents, and get rid of the lowest rated content. Check whether
you should share some of it again on social media.
8. Finally, remember to use this data to inform your future content strategy.

Example

Start with the channel specific audits before you get into specific posts. List your social media platforms,
the URL of your profile and how many followers you have. If you do this every month, you will get a good
idea of how your audience is growing.

You can use the social media platforms dashboard to make a list of your social media posts. Including
important information like URL, date, and time and if each post had a link or an image or video.

You can get more detailed by adding what the call to action was, the post's topic or if it was part of a
campaign. Next, add the metrics you want to measure, like click-throughs, likes, shares, number of
comments and so on.

Typically, you look for the content that was most engaging. That means the content that generated most
interactions like, likes or other reactions, shares and comments.

 Maybe you're seeing that posts with images on Twitter are getting more likes than simple text
posts. Plan to include images with your tweets going forward.
 Are you finding that Facebook posts that gets the most engagement are more on the educational
or the informative side? Since that's what your audience responds to, continue posting
educational posts on Facebook.

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Now that you've completed your social media audit, make a plan to do another one in a month, so you
can continue to monitor your engagement and now benchmark your changes moving forward.

3.10 Creating Content Effectively

CREATION GEAR AND TOOLS

 Home Studio. It doesn't have to be much, but an environment where you can stage shots, control
the audio and lighting, and have a professional background is going to improve the look and quality
of your content.
 Cameras. A smartphone's camera may be all you need, and even a smartphone camera is
incredibly advanced with great quality. If you want to upgrade, pick up a webcam that can attach
right to your computer. For professional-grade video, consider investing in a digital SLR camera with
video capabilities.
 Tripods and stabilizers. Use it on a desktop for seated interviews or raise it for standing videos. If
you're out and about creating content, pick up a tripod with adjustable legs that can wrap around
objects and hold your camera steady.
 Lighting. If you're going to mostly be shooting live video or tutorials with one person, a ring light will
be perfect. If you're going to be shooting either photography or video at a distance, consider
investing in some studio lights or LED panels.
 Sound. The microphone on your smartphone may be enough for now, but if you want to increase
your sound quality and crispness, and your flexibility, invest in either a lav mic that clips to
someone's lapel, or a shotgun mic.
 Background. You may have a blank wall that's working right now but think about getting a backdrop
or two for when you need a solid background in order to focus on the subject.
 Shooting stills. You'll need something to create a white background to shoot against, which could
be as simple as some white poster board, or a professional white sweep background. Use some
foam core to bounce lighting back onto the shadowed side of your object. You can also invest in a
light box.
 Podcast studio. Your microphones are going to need to be your focus, and the more investment
you're willing to make, the higher quality audio you're going to get. Make sure you have a good set of
headphones as well, typically ones that cover your ears to reduce outside noise. Depending on your
set-up, you may also want a boom arm to extend your mic, a pop filter, and a way to dampen room
sound, like installing some foam tiles around the walls.
 Details. If you don't have enough outlets, you may need a power strip or two, and some extension
cords. Additionally, make sure you have the cables you need, whether they be power, audio, or USB.
 Out-and-About. If you only have your smartphone, at least have a stabilizer with you to reduce
movements as you film. Or get in the habit of carrying a bag with your digital camera, tripod, and
mics.

APPS AND SOFTWARE

 Canva. Their homepage challenges you to "Design anything," and you really can: Instagram posts,
Facebook covers, Pinterest pins, as well as logos, infographics, posters, and more.
 Adobe Spark. It specializes in helping you create social graphics, or photos or images with text,
short videos, and webpages.
 Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, InDesign, and Illustrator. Edit your photography with Photoshop
and edit your videos with Adobe Premiere, both available on desktop and in app forms. You can also
use InDesign to create publications, infographics, and eBooks for your website, and use Illustrator to
design logos and graphics.
 Other Film Editing Software. Final Cut Pro, if you want to go with more professional tools. Mac also
comes with iMovie, and Windows comes with Windows Movie Maker if you want to ease into video
editing with free tools.
 Facebook Small Business Tools. Facebook also offers a suite of creative tools for businesses,
including A Color Story, a photo enhancement app; Mojo, which can turn images into animations;
Quik, a video editing app; and StoryBoost, that offers templates for Facebook and Instagram Stories
creation.
 Podcasting Software. If you're starting a podcast, make sure to have a Skype account first to
record distance interviews. Audacity is a free tool you can use to edit your podcasts, and Mac users
can also use GarageBand. For more professional editing tools, go with Avid Pro Tools or Adobe
Audition.
 Loom. Loom is a free screen capture tool that will allow you to film your screen motions as it records
a video of you speaking in the corner. Use it if you want to show a tutorial of a product, or a walk-
through of a service you offer.
 Powtoon. Powtoon is another tool to help you create animated videos which you can use as
explainers, tutorials, or promotion.
 Stock Photos. There are a number of stock photo sites you can tap, including Shutterstock and
iStock. Unsplash is a relatively new yet quite extensive library of free stock photos.

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 Stock Music. Looking for music to go with your videos? Licensing can be tricky, so check out sites
like PremiumBeat and Musicbed for quality stock music.

3.11 Building a Following on Social Media

Five Steps to Build a Following

1. Invite Facebook friends to follow your business page. Facebook gives you the option to invite
your friends and family to follow when you start a business page.
2. Post valuable content. If you post useful videos and articles, your followers may be more likely
to share them. That way, you get more exposure and there's a chance people who see your posts
start following you too.
3. Use #hashtags and @mentions. Hashtags are a great way to connect with potential customers.
They connect social media posts by topic and aggregate them under a single word. Mentions
may prompt them to share your post and it does expose your post to the audience of the person
or business you tagged.
4. Hire social media influencers. They start at minimum 2,000 followers and usually charge for
their services. You can find the right influencers for you using software like Social Beaker or
Tagger. It may be worth it to send some free flowers to a few socialites in the hopes that they will
post the product.
5. Create an advertising campaign. All good ads start with a good story.

3.12 Interacting and Moderating on Social Media

You want to make sure that people have positive associations with your brand, and the way you carry on
a conversation in social media has an impact.

The best way to create a positive brand impression is by responding to customers’ social media
comments in a timely and polite manner.

Four-Step Engagement Strategies to Maximize Good Branding

1. Respond within 24 hours. To a customer, social media portrays your brand's post the same way
it does your friend's ones. This gives you the opportunity to effectively portray your brand as a
friend, you should capitalize on this by responding to their comments, mentions, and tags at the
same speed their friends would.
2. Reply to positive feedback. Always like or favorite any of their positive brand mentions, to let
them know you see them and appreciate them. If someone posts something complementing your
brand, always respond with a comment. The more personalized the better.
3. Be polite and diplomatic to negative feedback. It's important to distinguish between legitimate
brand criticism and abuse. Abuse or inappropriate comments are just not right, and you should
hide or remove them. No need to react. Criticism involves a legitimate grievance with your brand.
4. Move issues out of public to private. DCB Cleaning installed a snack wall which led to rats.
The DCB Cleaning representative dealt with it the right way by apologizing, promising to
compensate, and then most importantly, moving the discussion to a private chat by direct
messaging the person.

Never ever argue with the customer or be anything other than professional on a brand account.

DEALING WITH CRITICISM

1. Acknowledge the comment to let the customer know they've been heard. Examples of this
include, "Hey Bob, we hear you."
2. Apologize if it's appropriate. Remember, apologies are easy and free, and they often make
your brand look considerate and sympathetic.
3. Solve the problem in a private conversation. This is important if you're going to negotiate
refunds or complimentary services, you don't necessarily want those done in public.

Any private message can be screenshotted and reposted, so it's important to be as courteous in
direct messages as you would be in public comments.

Some commenters, however, can't be reasoned with. That's why Facebook, Instagram and Twitter offer
hide reply or hide comment features for their users.

3.13 Managing Your Social Media Presence

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WORK AS A TEAM
Social platforms let different people post so you can work with a team. The main social media platforms
let you give other people permission to help manage your page and you can give people different roles
and levels of responsibility. Facebook, for instance, has six roles available for page moderation. These
roles loosely correspond to other social platform's, roles types too. They are, in descending order:

 Admins can create ads, view audience data, send and receive messages from the company
page and post and delete from it. They're also the only people who can assign roles to others.
Your social media manager and top company executives should always have admin status.
 Editors. Editors can do everything admins can do except assign roles on the page. Anyone
whose job it is to post to the page and respond to messages from the company should have
editor status.
 Moderators. Moderators can respond to page comments and send messages from the page.
Moderators can't, however, post directly to the page. This is a good designation for customer
service representatives working under a manager who has editor status.
 Jobs Manager and Advertisers. Advertisers and jobs managers can post advertisements to the
page and view audience data. This is a good level of access to give to people your company
partners with. It'll let you coordinate ads with them without giving them permission to post from
your page.
 Analyst. Facebook page analysts can only see your customer trends and user data. Most people
in your company should have analyst access so they can stay up to date on customer interests
and demographics.

AUTOMATE RESPONSES
Brand pages must be on 24/7 even when employees aren't and that's where setting up automatically
responding chatbots can help. It's easy to pre-program your automated replies to messages you may
receive, while no one in your team can immediately respond.

Response bots
1. Schedule person to person interactions,
2. Triage customer queries and direct them towards the right people,
3. Answer commonly asked questions
4. Respond to customers when your business is closed.

USE PUBLISHING TOOLS

Some of the large social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have some sort of publishing tool
embedded in them. It's where you can draft your post, schedule and publish them. It's also where you
keep a library of all your posts over time. Often you'll also find some data there on how your posts
performed.

Using a third party has the advantage that a software lets you manage across platforms.
Commonly used tools are Hootsuite, Sprout, Social and Buffer, for instance.

 These tools let you connect your social media accounts and then you can create, schedule and
manage your posts all from their tool.
 You can create a post and publish it on all your platforms at once.
 You can also create and manage your content calendar from these tools and keep a nice
overview of all your content and activity.
 They also make it possible to keep track of all the ongoing conversations and messages you are
receiving and you can respond straight from the tool.

3.13 How to Use Social Media Schedulers to Manage and Moderate Your Posts

Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Buffer’s most useful function is that they let you schedule all your
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram content on a single calendar.

Of the four largest social networks, only Twitter and Facebook allow users to schedule content directly.
Calendar scheduling’s benefits are two-fold: it allows you flexibility in your own work, and it ensures that
you have a steady flow of content posting over weekends and holidays.

Planoly and Tweetdeck are free—which makes them good tools to practice with.

WHEN TO SCHEDULE
According to Sprout Social’s aggregated data, the best times to publish on social platforms are:

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  8am, when people wake up for work
 12pm, when they’re eating lunch
 8pm, when they’re checking social media at the end of the day

Wednesday afternoon social posts netted the highest aggregate engagement. Posts on Sunday netted
the lowest. Most brands perform at their best during weekdays from 10am-5pm, and nearly all brands
perform at their worst between 10pm-5am.

Sprout Social’s data set also includes industry-specific data sets for tech, consumer goods, media,
education, healthcare, finance, and others. You can use these to plan the right social strategy for you.

HOW MUCH CONTENT SHOULD I POST WITH MY SCHEDULER?

Platform post lifetimes should guide how often you use your scheduler to post on them.

Twitter: 20-30 minutes. The short lifetime of tweets means that you can effectively post every half-hour
to maintain visibility, without overwhelming your followers with content.

Facebook: 5-6 hours. Facebook posts’ longer lifetime mean that you can post 3-4 times a day without
sacrificing visibility. As mentioned above, 8am, 12pm, 5pm, and 8pm are optimal times for Facebook
posts.

Instagram: 24-48 hours. You can post once a day on Instagram for maximum engagement. You can
also post one Story per day at 8am to maximize engagement in the story’s 24-hour lifespan.

Linkedin: 24-48 hours. People are more likely to engage in conversation beneath Linkedin posts than on
other platforms, though, so it’s a good idea to post at least once a day.

Pinterest: Up to 3 months. Pins are the “stickiest” form of post, so to speak, in that they last the longest
before the algorithm buries them. You should post once a day or less on Pinterest.

HOW TO MANAGE COMMENTS WITH SCHEDULERS

Hootsuite and Sprout Social offer the most comprehensive comment-management and feedback systems
of the softwares listed above.

Hootsuite allows users to separate channels into “streams” and “tabs,” through which they can arrange
social channels by platform, topic, and product. Hootsuite also lets you “share” these tabs with other
members of your team.

HOW TO USE SCHEDULERS’ AUDIENCE ANALYTICS TOOLS

Most analytics softwares, like Buffer, divide engagement into “impressions,” (also known as “reach”) and
“clicks.”
 “Impressions” count the number of times your post appears on users’ screens.
 “Clicks” tracks how many times they’ve clicked your post to further engage with it. This can take
the form of likes, reactions, comments, and more.

You can use this data to test new social strategies and adjust them in real-time.

HOW TO USE YOUR SCHEDULER’S AUDIENCE ANALYSIS DATA

You should periodically check your social campaign performances and triage 20-30 of your highest-
performing and lowest-performing posts into a document or spreadsheet.

Once you’ve done that, look for similarities and differences.

 Are the highest-performing posts oriented towards a general audience, rather than a specific
one?
 Do the lowest-performing ones use too much passive voice?

Use this information to adjust your social strategy and more keenly hone your “brand voice” moving
forward.

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