How to spring clean your social media

As of July 2020, over half the world is on social media. Perhaps you had big and bold plans to execute a new social media strategy at the start of the year, but with recent events, it’s no secret that many business plans have been completely shaken up, writes Daniel Lean, Manager of Customer Success at Hootsuite APAC.

If your small businesses’ social media hasn’t been getting much TLC recently, it may be confusing and even overwhelming to know where to begin as you try to breathe new life into your digital channels. However, there really is no better time to spring clean your social media and it’s best to start with these activities:

Decide which platforms to keep and which to shelve 

Sometimes it can feel as though your efforts are spread thin when it comes to managing multiple social media channels. If there’s one channel that resonates with your target audience more effectively than another, it may be useful to ask yourself if you should focus all your efforts there or even just replicate what you’re doing on your most successful platform across other channels.

If you decide on the latter, centralising your platform can be a great way of still being active and increasing your reach across multiple platforms, but adding a little extra attention to the one that yields the best results for your social media objectives. A great way to centralise your social media channels is to manage them all within the one platform.

As mentioned, while centralisation is great for managing content across multiple platforms that your business may have, there may be times when you are getting a flood of messages across these accounts, sending your multiple inboxes into overdrive. Hootsuite’s Inbox feature gives you the full context of your messages, across all linked accounts in threaded conversations, so you can reply to customers efficiently and even triage message replies to prioritise important interactions.

Your social media goals may have fallen to the wayside recently, however, don’t be too hard on yourself! If posting throughout this time hasn’t been a priority for you, that’s okay, now is a better time than ever to dust off your goals, realign and refocus on what matters to your business and it’s wider objectives. Firstly, think of what you wish to get out of social media, as this will help inform everything, from what you post, when you post it and what you choose to measure your success against.

A few social goals you may have include:

• Engagement: Never underestimate the value of an engaged community, as this means you have an audience that wants to hear about your business’s latest news and developments.
  • Ways to measure: engagement rate, amplification rate, click-through rate and audience growth rate.
• Awareness: this indicates how many people on social know you exist and understand what kind of products or services you offer.
  • Ways to measure: brand mentions, shares, post reach and impressions.
• Reputation management: Brand reputation can mean different things to different companies, depending on your audience. For businesses that focus on their consumer offerings, it might be all about your popularity and customer satisfaction, while business-to-business brands may choose to focus on industry perception and thought leadership.
  • Ways to measure: customer satisfaction score, rating, sentiment and social share of voice.
• Conversion or sales: This is often the end goal for many businesses’ social media activity. It is important to note that a ‘conversion’ is not the same as a purchase, a conversion can encompass anything from signing up for a free newsletter or downloading a free resource.
  • Ways to measure: conversion rate, cost per click and click-through rate.
• Lead generation: It is quite unlikely for a potential customer to purchase upon their first encounter of your product online, so bringing in leads is a key way to use social media to fill your sales funnel and extract value for your business.
  • Ways to measure: conversion rate.

Have a content clean out

Did you know that the type of online content people are identifying and engaging with has significantly changed in recent months? When asked what kind of content they’d like more of, 34 per cent of females and 33 per cent of males want to see more funny videos and memes, while 34 per cent of females and 32 per cent of males want more how-to/ tutorial-style videos.

With this in mind, while the pictures from your content shoot in 2016 are great, it may be time for a refresh – if you aren’t in a place to dedicate time or money to updating your content, an easy way to add some variance to your feed is to post User Generated Content or play around with mediums such as stories and highlights.

If you are struggling with ideas for engaging content, a good way to determine what kind of content resonates with your audience is to do a brief social audit of your competitors. Not only does that allow you to stay up to date, but it may get you to form ideas that are still authentic to your brand and audience.

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