Everyone knows that social media is a great tool to drive traffic to your website, but it’s not as simple as posting when you feel like it and hoping for the best. Having a social media strategy can help you understand how your business can benefit from the power of social media – and a schedule is a great place to start. Having a social media sharing schedule can double your traffic, by providing your audience with targeted and valuable information that will keep them engaged, on a regular basis.
It’s not quite that easy though. You need to think about what content you want to share, where to share it and when. When considering what to share, it’s a good idea to share different content with your audience. This can mean sharing relevant industry articles or podcasts, not just your own content. It needs to be varied too, not just promotional material. People share content for different reasons; it may be for entertainment, to define themselves or their business, to stay connected to their audience, or to support a cause. Bear in mind that if your content is time sensitive, it will not be long before it is out of date. Evergreen content lends itself more to a schedule of sharing and resharing a year down the line.
Considering where to share your content is the next point. There are many social platforms with differing audiences using them, so you need to figure out a few that will offer you the most targeted response. For this you need to know where your audience spend their time and planning a schedule needs to take into consideration the differences; Facebook is very different from Twitter. For example, share tips on Twitter, entertaining videos on Facebook, industry specific content on LinkedIn and visual content on Pinterest.
When to share or reshare content depends on your needs and your audience’s response to your content. Deciding when to share (daily, weekly, monthly) also depends on the platform. Pinterest has on average 5 posts per day, Twitter about 3 per day and Facebook twice a day. Creating a calendar helps you to look at a week at a time. Testing out your schedule will let you know of its success, so try different times, different topics, different types of updates/visuals.
Once you have made the leap to creating and testing a schedule, use Analytics to examine the results. It can take a while to tweak the perfect schedule, so it’s worth keeping at it.
For more on social media sharing, contact us. We spend a lot of time finding out the best places and latest trends on social media marketing for our clients – do you need that service too?