A broad strategy of being everywhere at the same time is fine for a huge brand with a substantial budget for marketing and a team of social media experts in a specialized department. But what should you do if you own a tiny, new brand with a limited spend or time to devote to marketing on social channels? What if most of your time is employed running your business and you don’t have spare money to hire a social marketing firm to cover all the major social channels at once?
Let’s look at the best social media strategy for time- or cash-strapped SMEs
Quality Over Quantity
Whether posting to Facebook groups to attract interest in your products or adding a message to a photo upload on Instagram, taking time to prepare the copy is important. The message behind the copy also matters because it shapes what people unfamiliar with the brand will think of it.
Facebook tends to be a social channel that favors personal stories whereas corporate sponsorship with product placement and other openly promotional aspects on Instagram are readily accepted on the platform. The prose should be well written, grammatically correct, and above all, interesting to the reader. When a post fails because it’s poorly produced, it can hurt the brand and cost potential sales. Taking the extra time to write something well or hire writing talent that can, is definitely worth it. Injecting personality into posts to show that the brand is not afraid to be humorous is also effective.
Choose Your Social Media Channels Wisely
Not every social channel will suit your brand. Some decidedly won’t suit it at all and should be largely avoided. For instance, both Twitter and to a slightly lesser extent, Instagram, are mobile-oriented and used on-the-fly. While some people do post written stories attached to photos on Instagram, there are just as many brands and personalities that upload live videos, stories about their meeting or where they’ve just been. With Twitter, the steady stream of tweets provides live updates or a stream of consciousness.
Prepare to use the correct platform to reach the appropriate audience. An agency like The Guerrilla Agency can help guide you on which social platform(s) would be a good fit for your brand and how to make a meaningful impact on them.
Posting Frequency vs Posting Effectiveness
Each social channel has an ideal posting frequency. There is some flexibility on the posting frequency to limit your time exposure to a social channel. However, the best way to manage the workload is to use software. Not every social channel likes the use of third-party software, but most cooperate with the major software tools for social media like HootSuite, TweetDeck, IFTTT and others via the social networks’ API framework.
Here is where balancing available time or outsourcing image, video and/or content production is helpful to reduce the time taken. Also, consider whether you can allocate sufficient time to keep up with a posting frequency that’ll make a significant impact on the channel. In which case, you’re better off producing content less often on fewer social platforms to get improved results from the ones you have time to utilize.
SMEs always worry about the time that managing social media will take. It’s a fair concern because it can eat away at productive time. Thankfully, employing specific strategies to maximize the results of the time and financial investment gets the most out of any social media marketing.
