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As originally seen on Forbes
I often hear that companies aren’t sharing on social media because their industry is too traditional, or their firm is too conservative. There is also this common feeling among established companies that there just isn’t a place for their brand in social media.
Well, here’s the deal. However bad your firm is at social, it’s likely your competitors are even worse. The most common “best practices,” are failing them, and this is your opportunity to make your mark. Here are just a few of the classic blunders to watch out for.
Overemphasis on LinkedIn Company Pages
Take a look at the average company LinkedIn Page and see who follows it. You’ll find that the majority of the people on that list are just their employees. Even if they share great content, it’s only going to people who already know about.
Commonly, corporate pages are just followed by employees of the company and maybe the occasional family member (at least your mom likes your posts). When they share to that page, their posts aren’t actually doing anything useful.
Instead, if you can get your employees to share the content, the audience that sees them grows exponentially. Each company page typically has 930 followers, the majority of which are people already connected with the company, whereas the employees may each have 500+. With just 10 employees sharing, that’s 5,000+ people who can see your content.
Posting Content that is Promotional, Not Informational
Go and pull up any law or accounting firm on LinkedIn, what kind of content are they posting?
Accolades, new partners, updates to their offices, all internal things that a potential client doesn’t care about. They don’t care that some guy named Todd has been made a partner on his fiftieth birthday and got a new water cooler for the office out of celebration. When clients search you out on social media, they want information that can help their businesses succeed.
Whenever you post on social media, ask yourself: is this promotional or is this informational? And if you answer promotional, it will likely fall flat. Then again, your mom may like it.
Every single post should add value to the potential client. For professionals, this means sharing information that your clients need to know today. The rollout of part one of the PPP was a perfect example. Small and medium-sized businesses across the country were clamoring for real expertise to help them safely access desperately needed government loans. Were they looking for guidance from the government? No! There were looking to you, the experts.
If you provide value in your posts, instead of being promotional, you will not only bring in more business to your company, your audience on social media will grow and your influence in your industry will be recognized.
Content isn’t Being Created by the Best and Brightest
Now, I want to make it clear, I’m not ragging on marketers. I know the guy who helps me with all of my content, while he may not be the brightest, he works dang hard. But your company has experts in your field, who know more about your business than a marketer ever will.
So let them speak!
The real opportunity for engagement on social comes from your best and brightest, people who are sharp as a tack but may not be the first who come to mind when you think of writers. They may also be the busiest, so you may need to be creative. You can have your marketer interview them, have them shoot a short video on their phone, or cut up a recent webinar they gave into short digestible sound bites.
Other great thing: these experts that you have in your company. People know they’re experts, so an article by them has more credibility than the same article by your marketer.
Inconsistent Posting
Have you ever seen (or maybe done this yourself) a company page or an employee have an event coming up and post twenty times immediately before the event, but never post otherwise?
Be deliberate in your marketing, don’t just create “random acts of social media.” Too many firms have posting that is all over the place; they’ll load everything up on a single, last ditch effort to post on social media, not realizing they are overloading their audience.
Social media campaigns at their best need to be slow, consistent work, a regular drum beat set around a central theme. For example, when you think of Verizon, what line do you hear?
“Can you hear me now?”
For years, Verizon put out commercials all around that line, that theme. And n0w, it’s an integral part of their company and just mentioning that line evokes thoughts of red, black, and white.
You cannot make a social media campaign random or inconsistent. If you do, you will never be able to be top of mind for a client. You will be like your campaign: thoughtless, sudden, and annoying.
They Suffer from Under Exposure
Your competitor is under-exposed; it’s as simple as that. They are so cautious and afraid of overusing social media, they end up under-using it.
To get the best exposure on LinkedIn and all social media, without going overboard, you should be posting once every business day, or twenty times a month. Any less than that and you just won’t be showing up enough to get people’s attention. Data from Buffer App shows that if you post once each business day, 50% of your network will see at least one thing you post. Most users aren’t on LinkedIn often, so frequency is your friend.
What’s more is that less than 4% of users on LinkedIn post once a week, so you will be more visible than 96% of users, with just a posts per week. With your competitor posting in a random pattern and you posting every business day, who do you think will show up on a potential clients feed?
Don’t be afraid that you are too late because, fortunately, most of your competitors aren’t really in the game. Take a deliberate approach to LinkedIn, and you will find real success.
As originally seen on Forbes