By now, everyone has set new business goals for 2020 and the rest of the coming decade. As digital marketing experts, especially in the field of social media, we strive to have the most insightful, entertaining content on the market. Social media becomes a more crucial aspect in everyday marketing efforts each year and we want to make sure you kick the year off right!
While staying up-to-date on social media best practices is critical for any social media expert, it’s equally, if not more, important to take care of yourself first! Regardless of what industry you work in, self-care should be at the top of your priority list — not only is it good for you, but it also helps you do your best work. The following tips help you with both your social media work and self care.
Social Content Practices
Below is a list of the most important social media practices that you should be aware of as you go into 2020.
Keep Profiles Up-To-Date
Before posting or scheduling any content, ensure your social profiles are well-built and carefully thought out. You want to make sure your company’s information is all current so your audience can trust your brand. Continued mistakes and errors in your content or profiles can lose the interest and trust of your audience.
Don’t Make It All About You
You always want your content to reflect well on your brand. When it comes to the variety in your content, don’t make everything simply about your brand. Share applicable content with outside links and images so you don’t come off as arrogant and vain. This can be news from your industry, helpful tips for your audience, or fun, engaging content that everyone can enjoy.
Watch Your Competition
You can gain a lot of valuable insights from your competitors. Seeing what works for them could potentially benefit your social marketing efforts as well. Here are a few questions to ask yourself when taking a peek at your competition’s content:
- What are they currently doing?
- What have they done in the past?
- Are there any threats to your brand?
- What does their audience look like?
- What are the strategies that are working well for them?
Choose The Networks That Work
Not every brand or business needs all social media platforms to market their products and/or services. Understand your audience demographic before deciding which social platforms you’re going to use. That way, you can put your time and energy into the content on the platforms you know are going to be effective for your audience.
While most social media platforms have similar elements, they each have unique parts to their content format that you can work to your advantage. Make sure you understand the differences between each social platform so you can create the proper content to serve to the masses.
Also, take note of the language style being used on different platforms. What works well for Twitter won’t always work well for content on LinkedIn.
Change Up Platform Content
When you post the same content to different platforms of a brand on the same day, it can come off as repetitive and downright lazy. Instead, add something unique on each of your social platforms to keep your audience interested and engaged on all ends. This will increase engagement and trust towards your brand from your audience.
Keep In Touch With Your Audience
Let your audience know that you are listening to them this year! By staying engaged with your followers, you can make valuable connections to keep your audience feeling heard and noticed. Always respond to comments, recommendations, and reviews and bring up opportunities for community conversation. Remember that social media was created to be an engaging online community!
Don’t Make Content a Sales Proposal
With social, we don’t want to berate our followers into buying our products or services. Social networks are all about gaining the trust of our audience. Bring value to your content rather than adding too many promotional posts. We recommend 40% educational posts, 40% engagement posts, and 20% promotional posts each month.
Social Media Working Habits
Now that you have the tactics ready for your upcoming social campaigns, let’s make sure you’re taking care of yourself. You need to feel your best mentally so you can create the best content for your brand. Good mental health is crucial in today’s social media industry.
Set Achievable Goals
One of the best things you can do in making progress with your work is defining specific goals. Without setting and writing out these goals, you’ll be wasting your time. Some good ways to set achievable goals is to use the SMART goals tool, which you may have heard of before.
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-based
These SMART goals will allow you to stay accountable and track the progress you’ve made.
Take On the Hard Tasks First
Many studies have proven that your work ethic is stronger at the beginning of the workday. Take advantage of that willpower by completing your most difficult tasks first thing in the morning. Once your willpower has decreased, you can tackle the easier tasks. This improved daily schedule will increase your productivity and save you time.
Set a Time Management Plan
It’s important to know how much time you are going to dedicate to social media in a day. We know some days can be harder than others to stay on task with specific to-dos. You need to create a plan so you don’t burn yourself out and waste valuable time.
Fortunately, there’s an app to help you with that. It’s called the Pomodoro Technique app and we highly recommend it. Using the app at the beginning of your workday will help you focus and make sure you’ve addressed all messages and notifications that were received overnight. It will also ensure that you boost your productivity throughout the workday so you don’t burn out.
Take Mental Health Breaks
Being in “work mode” seems to be the norm for our work climate nowadays, especially in the social media industry. As research has shown in the last few years, we know that too much use of social media can be harmful to our mental health. It’s important to take a break every now and then, no matter how much work you have. When you leave the office, turn off your social media notifications to give yourself a break. If some responses are urgent, give yourself a 10-15 minute time span after work to respond and then shut your platforms off for the night. Your brain will thank you!
Not All Content Is Perfect
We all want our content to be extremely attractive and effective, but you can’t expect it to be perfect. There will be times you may realize your content is completed and not exactly how you wanted. That’s ok. It’s important to still have attention to detail with all your posts, but not to the point where it drives you crazy. Remind yourself that you are doing great and keep pushing on!
Give Yourself a Pat on the Back
Social media experts wear many different hats at their job and sometimes that can leave us stressed out by the end of the week. If you feel like your workload is too large to complete all your tasks, let your supervisors know of all the tasks you have on your daily schedule and how long it takes to complete each task. It’s ok to defend your work so you can be comfortable.
Ready to Take on the Social World?
Are you ready to implement these new practices and healthy work habits into your upcoming content campaign? Perhaps you need some guidance before getting started? One of the best ways to care for yourself is to ask for help when you need it, and iFocus Marketing is here to lend you a hand!
Get in touch with us today. Our team of digital marketing experts will plan a unique strategy for your business to keep you up-to-date in the ever-moving technological world we live in.
