Social Media
Love it or hate it – you can't ignore social media. Your target market is on social media and you can reach them there with the right techniques.
Social media has exploded over the last few years to the point where traffic from social networks surpassed traffic from search engines for the top 100 media companies.
Which Social Network?
There are dozens of social networks and new ones popping up all the time. Here's a few of the most relevant ones in New Zealand right now:
- There are about 1.9 billion users active every month and about 1.1 billion users active on Facebook every day. Your target market is probably on Facebook. However, they aren't necessarily on Facebook to shop so make sure your strategy adds value.
- Microblogging is short 'posts' about a topic, often with a link. If you're new to social media Twitter is going to seem overwhelming. Twitter is a great place to learn and converse about specialist topics, especially if you or your audience are techies.
- Originally LinkedIn was a just a glorified collection of CVs. Now it's evolved into the leading social network for professionals.
- Visual posts attract and engage a different type of user. Instagram is ideal for people who like to consume and publish visual content.
- The original visual social network which has been overtaken by Instagram. Still relevant for visual users and has powerful features for creating collections of images – ideal for design projects.
- TikTok
- TikTok is the latest social media craze. On this platform you can only post short (15 to 60 second long) videos.
- YouTube
- Not many people consider this a social network but it's one of the originals. Also, because of the sheer volume of searches every day YouTube is the second largest search engine on the internet.
- Google+
- This is only listed here as a professional courtesy. Google+ only ever gained traction with geeks, and only really a subset of geeks - those that worked for Google. The network has been unbundled so some of the useful features could become stand alone products.
There's lots to get your head around. The trick is to prioritise and start with one social network and do a thorough job before moving onto the next one. If you're not sure, get in touch and we can work out what the best plan for your social media strategy is.
How we can help you with social media
You may just want to hand everything over and review the monthly results. If you are someone who likes to spend time in social media you'll be able to do as much or as little as you want.
Here's some of the ways we can help you:
- Social Media Strategy
- There are dozens of different social networks now – which is the most important for your audience? How often do you need to publish content? What do you do when things don't go to plan? We can help you work out a social media strategy as part of your digital marketing strategy.
- Content Creation
- We can help you produce content to share, or, find other people's content for you to share. Either way a big part of the job is content creation.
- Graphic Design
- Images increase engagement. You need to have suitable, relevant, eye catching images for all your content (this includes a shareable image on every page and post on your website too).
- Monitoring
- You need to know who is saying what online when it's happening. Answering the phone used to be the main way people contacted you if there's an issue – now it's more likely they will contact you online. So, you need to be keeping an eye on all channels and reply promptly.
- Publishing
- The easy bit, and the most tedious, is publishing content in the right place at the right time. Publishing content can be automated to free you up for the proactive tasks that require a human touch – like being social and engaging with people online.
- Software
- There's dozens of different platforms out there to help you keep on top of everything. Tools range from publishing automation, monitoring, and analytics with some products doing all three jobs. We're happy to discuss what you need and make some recommendations.
