Are you looking for the latest social media best practices for your start-up? These 15 best practices will make sure that your social media stays relevant, easy-to-manage, and performs well for your business.
It’s not easy to find good social media advice for start-up companies these days. Your needs are completely different from the needs of a larger, more established brand. So before you implement advice meant for a larger company, we have a series of tips that will simplify your social media.
With dozens of social sites to consider, you’ll want to make the right decisions from day one. It takes a delicate blend of research, strategy, and automation to produce results for a brand new company. We’re going to tell you how you can get your social media strategy off to a strong start.
Here are 15 potent social media best practices that you can use to get results for your business website. From traffic attraction to engagement and visibility, these tips will support your growth.
#1: Know What Your Audience Wants
Social media marketing is about promoting the products and services on your business website. As you perform your audience research, identify your ideal customer—the one who is most likely to buy what you’re selling.
Try to understand what this single brand persona wants from you on each separate platform. What would make them engage? Why would they click? It’s important to get your ideal customer to engage first.
#2: Understand and Prioritize Channel Selection
Investigate each social media channel and what they are about. Then list the ones you’d like to be on and arrange them in order of importance and according to your niche. Focus on the top three. For example, a life coach would do better on LinkedIn first and then Facebook and Instagram.
Some social media best practices involve eliminating volume and unnecessary scale. Start small with a limited channel presence to focus on audience growth. You can always expand later!
#3: Simplify Your Social Media Strategy
You’re a small start-up with big dreams, but you don’t need a big social media strategy to match. Instead, you only need to create a one-page strategy with goals for your three core platforms.
More than 51% of marketers don’t have a strategy in place because it’s too complex! Ditch the long hours and stick to easy-to-use, simple-to-update SMART goals for each platform.
#4: Define Your Brand Voice and Make It Channel Specific
Some platforms are better for certain demographics—look into that! Amplify your chances of reaching the right people by defining and then refining your brand voice for social media.
TikTok, for example, is 60% 16-24-year-olds, while Twitter is 66% men. The brand message delivered to each demographic is going to be very different! Tailor your voice to suit your three best platforms. Remember to keep your tone friendly and not stiff or too corporate.
#5: Create an Easy Editorial Calendar
Your social media posts will benefit from an editorial calendar. Co-schedule is a great tool for this and makes planning your posts easy. Decide when, where, and what to post in the application.
Start with industry-recommended post frequency and best publishing times. Ultimately, it’s better to publish regularly and measure when you get the best responses. Every niche is different.
#6: Focus on the Message Not the Medium
Great social media tips for business are usually common sense. When creating your social media content, the message is far more important than your social platform. Spend your time on what your post is trying to say.
If a post doesn’t have enormous value for your community, it won’t be shared. Don’t repeat messages across networks. Instead, customize the same post for each specific network.
#7: Avoid Direct Sales Content 90% of the Time
The social media rule of thirds argues that it’s wise for a third of your content to be directly promotional, but this isn’t ideal advice for start-ups.
Without a loyal audience, directly promotional content can be harmful, especially if it’s not focused on the awareness phase of your customer journey. In the beginning, educate your customers instead. These posts will be indirectly promotional and will still lead to sales.
#8: Use the 80/20 Principle to Find Content Opportunities
Some social media best practices, such as the 80/20 principle, reveal hidden opportunities. Once you’re posting regularly, measure which of your post types perform best, analyze it, and double down. Ask yourself, “Which 20% of my social posts get 80% of the engagement?”
Find these high-performing posts and copy their format, message, and posting routine. The goal is to take your best posts and replicate that formula in order to achieve the quickest rate of success.
#9: Encourage Comments and Engagement
Social media marketing is an indirect science. Even though you want people to click on your posts and visit your website, they probably won’t do it without more engagement.
Secure engagement by encouraging discussion, comments, and the sharing of information. Respond to every comment and make an attempt to stimulate conversation and connection.
#10: Regularly Check Out Your Competition
Your competition is going to be executing their own social media strategies. List your top five competitors and keep an eye on their content for ideas, inspiration, and social media tips.
You can use monitoring programs, competitor analysis tools, or periodically review their posts and platforms. This will help you keep up with niche trends, changes, and influencers.
#11: Ignore Social Media Trolls
Social media is a public platform where content lives forever. You will, at some point, experience criticism. In that case, it’s up to you to provide your customer with support and service.
But sometimes criticism crosses boundaries and exists for different reasons. Trolls like to inflame, provoke, enrage, and destabilize your team. They should be identified, ignored, or blocked.
#12: Invest in Social Media Automation Tools
Your business website will benefit from the addition of social media automation tools to support your social strategy. Being able to schedule your posts all at once so that they publish on different days is one perk. Tools such as Buffer, CoSchedule, Hootsuite, and DrumUp simplify how you find, create, publish, and monitor social content. Plus, it frees up your time to plan more engaging and meaningful posts.
#13: Social Advertising Is Your Best Friend
There are some social media best practices that are avoided by small business owners. Social advertising tends to be one of them. Ironically, it’s one of the best ways to get your content in front of your target audience.
Highly-targeted ads will attract people to your page, and if they like your message, they will stick around. They might even become customers! Always begin with a small social ad budget and be very specific with how you spend it.
#14: Your Annual Content Audit and KPI Assessment
Start-ups can only benchmark their progress after a few months of regular posting and engagement. After your first year, you’ll have all the data you need to create a fully customized social media plan for the next 365 days.
If you’ve chosen the right website hosting or web host, you’ll also have access to your site analytics. Together these will help you piece together how your social content has been performing. Understand your key performance indicators and use the data to create your next social strategy.
#15: Measure, Adjust, and Expand Your Strategy
Here’s when it all comes together. Because you’ve been using these simplified social media best practices, you’ve only had to manage three core platforms. The amount of content being posted is specific and targeted, which means you are on your way to improved engagement and increased sales.
Best of all, you’ve managed to collect enough significant data to create a streamlined strategy for next year! The final tip is to measure your data, make adjustments to your strategy, and expand as you see fit. Start small and scale up. Focus on engagement first to build an audience.
Integrate social media buttons or widgets on your website for extra promotion. As you use these social media best practices, your site traffic will expand. When it does, make sure that your web hosting package can increase with your audience.
These social media tips will help you manage your social content for more engagement, faster growth, and better post-performance.
