Social media DOs and DON’Ts – Our top tips

There’s an excellent scene in Irish Drama Love/Hate where gangster Nidge in his suburban Dublin home is looking at videos about guns on Youtube, his wife Trish asks him what he’s doing, and he tells her he’s updating his Bebo page. While Bebo might have been and gone and come back again to haunt us, social media is everywhere, from the butcher to the baker and the candlestick maker, even the gangsters in Love/Hate have a social media presence. So how do we stand out on social media? Here’s Design Clinic’s top tips for social media:

1. Be Picky

Have you ever Googled a small business and found their twitter account, clicked on it had a scroll and nothing, a deafening silence and tumble weed? Or maybe you clicked on an Instagram page and there were No Posts Yet. What does that say to you about the business? If you’re going to do social media for your small business, our advice is to have a social network or two of your choice that you enjoy using. Don’t set up many and use them a little. Set up one or two and use them a lot. The key is to have fun with social media you enjoy using while reaching your audiences.

2. Promote Less, Post More

Ever heard of the 80/20 rule when it comes to dieting, well the same goes for social media. 80% of the time you should create ‘engagement posts’ to reflect your brand personality. Post engagement posts every day. Tell your audiences your daily story: what you’re doing, where you’re going, who you’re meeting, what you’re eating. You should only be promoting products, events, or whatever it is you want to sell, 20% of the time. Otherwise people will switch off and disengage.

3. Talk To One Person

You might have 15,000 followers all of them with different lives and interests. It’s impossible to appeal to all of those audience members all of the time. You might have Mandy who drives a classic Merc and likes to buy second hand, or you might have Dan who likes to get the newest gadgets when they hit the market. Different types of posts will appeal to them differently. It’s important to understand who your core audiences are. Write audience profiles – describe them, their life, their buying habits, what they read, and so on, and create content for that one person. If you feel like you have more than one audience profile, write to one person today and the other tomorrow. Don’t try to appeal to everyone all of the time.

4. Tell Us Your Secrets

Ever followed someone on Instagram who doles out advise on keeping fit/feeding your kids/doing up your house? We now use social media as a reliable source of knowledge and information and influencers are now our go to for ‘how to…’ We all have an area of expertise that we can share, or at least we know what works for our business. Share your knowledge of your thing be it finance/marketing/animation and establish yourself as a trusted voice in your industry.

5. Look Good

If you hear a piece of information you will remember just 10% of it, but if you see that same information in a visual you will recall 65% of it. When it comes to social media marketing, you can have that copy well honed but without the visual it’s nothing. For your business to stand out it must look good, from your daily posts to your profile pictures and banners. And remember to have brand consistency, all your social media profiles should echo your brand aesthetic and be visually consistent. Use the same profile picture, the same banner image, and the same bio across profiles. Don’t visually confuse people – get it designed by professionals.

Here at Design Clinic we help businesses with their outstanding social media look.
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