By Sandra Collins

This blog is about social media.

 

Each social media platform holds its own user expectations for how and what content are shared. This is often called the “voice” or “tone” you use when you post. If you’re just getting started with social media, you may find helpful this overview of the most popular platforms.

BTW, in general, social media sites often have options for paid advertising via ads or “sponsored” content; that topic isn’t covered in this post.

Facebook

• Facebook is friendly, relaxed, and feels personal. For business purposes, it tends to be used for B2C (business to consumer) more than for B2B (business to business) organizations.
• For B2C, you can use it as your primary social media tool and share information related to your business as well as employee-related happenings.
• Facebook tends to have a friendlier feel than the professional content on LinkedIn. You can post information on the products/services that you sell and business-related content and suggestions, but it’s generally kept shorter and a little lighter in tone, with more like a “Hey, here’s news!” feeling.
• While you may have a personal Facebook presence connected to your friends, you should have a separate Facebook presence just for your business. (There’s information on setting up a business page here: http://curiousdog.us/1mU6PmY and here: http://curiousdog.us/1Zi80Z6.)
• B2B companies generally use a LinkedIn business page as their primary social media presence; however, if resources permit, I like to see B2B companies have a business Facebook page as well, where they can share employee-related and fun information that allows followers to see the “human” side of their business. Consumers’ wishes to see this kind of information has been one of the results of the huge growth of social networks.
• You can also share your business-related information on your personal profile (a) if your friends don’t mind, (b) if they like to know what you’re up to, or (c) if they might refer people to your business so you’d like to stay in front of them. However, be sure to avoid the opposite – don’t post on your business page the personal content you’d send to your friends. So, while it would not be appropriate to share photos of your wild birthday party on your business’s Facebook page, it would be appropriate to share the business’s human content, such as a company picnic, an honor bestowed on you or one of your employees, or photos of a community activity that your business supported.
• You can follow and post to other business pages or groups, and you’ll see some of their status updates in your Facebook news feed. This activity is an especially good idea if you “partner” with other businesses to provide services or to refer prospects for non-competing services.

LinkedIn

• On LinkedIn you build a personal profile focused on your professional life.
• Professionals use LinkedIn for connecting with their business contacts about business-related things; it’s not for personal content like Facebook is. Keep in mind that if you own or are employed by a business, the content you post to your personal account will reflect on your company as well. People have gotten into trouble by connecting with business associates (or clients!) and then posting content that isn’t appropriate. Keep the content professional.
• In your status update feed, you can share business content you have found on LinkedIn or elsewhere and add your thoughts if you wish. You’ll see content that your connections have shared as well.
• You should limit the self-promotion you do on LinkedIn because you’ll be judged as a spammer and social media judgment is harsh.
• Personal opinions on non-business topics aren’t appreciated; for example, even if you feel that current politics have a direct affect on business and the economy, posting information that is biased to your view of one particular party would be seen as inappropriate. Ditto for religion and other “personal” topics.
• You can join and participate in dozens of Groups on LinkedIn. There are a large number of topic-focused groups to choose from; do a search on key words to find them. If you have limited resources, you can choose to join just a small number of groups, so you’ll be able to focus and participate more frequently. You can adjust how you would like to receive updates from these groups and you can post updates to the group that members will see when they access the group or receive notifications. Many people spend a lot of time in groups looking for prospects and like-minded peers; you may even connect with someone who will become a customer. You can start or respond to discussions that groups members have, and offer helpful information if you wish. In these discussions you can direct people to your own website or other assets, but remember that you must do this rarely, gently, and judiciously.
• A nice advantage of LinkedIn is that you can use their publishing platform to post long-form content you’ve written about professional matters. It’s connected to your personal LinkedIn profile rather than to a company page. People you’ve connected with on LinkedIn will be alerted whenever you post. Once you’ve posted more than three articles you’ll have your own author page that features all of the articles you’ve written, which may drive up the number of people following your posts, exposing your content to a wider audience.
• If you’re a business owner or run your company’s social media function, you can also create a company page on LinkedIn where you’d promote your business’s content, including company announcements and sales promotions. People who follow your company page will be alerted in their feed when you post content there. It doesn’t automatically interact with your personal profile – you would update your company page separately. You can create a separate status update on your personal profile to share your company page content if you wish. Read more about setting up a company page here: http://curiousdog.us/1mSMaiv.
• Generally I decide about having a company page based on this distinction: if your business and your brand is all about YOU (say, you’re a consultant), you can decide whether you’d like to forego a company page because your own personal LinkedIn profile would cover many aspects of your business. If you have employees and your brand is your company’s name, you would want to use a company page in addition to your personal profile.

Twitter

• Twitter’s content updates (“tweets”) are limited to 140 characters so content is concise. (Twitter shows you the number of characters you’ve used as you’re typing.) People use Twitter to share their viewpoints, news, and other information.
• You can use Twitter in combination with a Facebook business page and/or LinkedIn profiles/pages, and generally your tweets should reflect the content style you use when you post to those platforms (i.e., friendly vs. professional). You can post short tweets about content you’ve posted on those sites, with links to where people can read the details. Again you should refrain from posting personal information using your business-centric account. Some people choose to use one account for both their business and personal tweets, especially if they themselves are their brand, but remember you’d have to keep the personal information appropriate. I, personally, don’t love that approach because some people start sharing irrelevant personal information like what they had for breakfast.
• Twitter is also useful for promotional announcements and reminders, such as when a sales promotion starts or ends or you’re hosting an event at a particular time.
• I’ll make the general statement that the younger your target market is, the more likely they use Twitter.
• Generally if you choose to use Twitter, you need to go through the effort to follow other people on Twitter so you can re-tweet their tweets, keeping you engaged with the greater community. If someone re-tweets one of your tweets, you can tweet to thank them, “favorite” their tweet, or even decide to follow them. You’ll see tweets from people/companies you’ve followed in your Twitter feed, and you can share the things you think would be helpful to your followers.
• Twitter and most of the other social media platforms use “hashtags” (#) to organize information. You can make up hashtags or use hashtags other people have made up, and then tweets that have used that hashtag will be organized together on a Twitter page. Then, if someone searches or clicks on that term they would find the page of tweets using that hashtag.
• Alternatively, there’s the @ symbol, which is used to identify a particular account a person or business uses. If you are going to re-tweet someone’s tweet, you’d use their @ to refer to them/their account.
• As an example, say we’re talking about Bruce Springsteen. He uses @springsteen as an account name, so if you were tweeting about his content directly or re-tweeting his tweet, you’d make sure @springsteen was in your tweet, to point back to him and his account. However, if you were tweeting that you saw him in concert, you’d use a hashtag such as #BruceSpringsteen or #SpringsteenConcert to clarify your post or to organize your tweet along with others.
• You could even make up a hashtag to express a thought, such as #SpringsteenRocks and then the tweet would be on a page with other tweets using that hashtag. You could also add commentary to your tweets by creating or using hashtags such as #awesome or #GoodIdea.
• Hashtags don’t have spaces in them and upper and lower case are recognized as the same. Generally, it’s not a good idea to use more than two hashtags in a tweet because it hinders readability.
• When there is a recognized event or a social “movement,” it will often have a hashtag to identify it, and when you use the hashtag you are participating or showing solidarity with it.
• Find out more about using hashtags here: http://curiousdog.us/1P7HcFc.

YouTube

• YouTube, of course, hosts videos.
• The tone here tends to be relaxed and friendly, and may even focus on a video’s entertainment value, though serious content is fine as well.
• Creating videos about your business is a great idea. The popularity of videos as a means of communication continues to soar, and they’re very effective marketing tools. Plus, search engines index content and your videos may be found in search results. You can put videos on your website as well as on YouTube.
• Be aware that the longer the video, the more viewers will exit part-way through the video. It’s just the nature of our attention spans. Less than three minutes is preferred. However, longer how-to videos may keep viewers for a longer period of time if they are earnestly seeking information, as will videos with high entertainment value.
• It’s rare to create a video that goes viral (i.e., gets shared by hundreds, thousands, or millions of people), as much as we would all love that. However, if you produce brilliant, entertaining videos, who’s to say it couldn’t happen? The nature of viral content is notoriously fickle. It’s hard to say why some cat videos get shared a million times and others don’t.

Instagram and Pinterest

• Content on Instagram or Pinterest is posted via sharing visuals such as photos, and generally includes little text. These platforms are primarily used by B2C companies. Content on Instagram is posted (and largely consumed) only via mobile devices, not on desktops.
• Either or both of these platforms are a good choice if your business can share interesting and frequent visuals. People follow others and share content.
• The content voice on these platforms is relaxed and can help you share insight into the personality of your business. You can (and should) link to your website or other assets.
• Here’s an older but still relevant article about these platforms, focusing on Instagram but with some comparisons as to how it differs from Pinterest: http://curiousdog.us/1Op0gzh.
• It seems to me that people tend to prefer using one platform or the other, so as a business owner if you’re using online analytics you’d probably need to use both and see which is referring more people to your assets.

Promoting and Cross-Promoting Your Content

• You can use social media platforms to share content you create, such as blogs, and to make announcements about your business, such as any events you are holding.
• The various platforms generally allow you to include a photo, video, or gif.
• Whatever social media platforms you use, wherever you can you should include links to your other content such as longer-form online articles, blogs, web pages, and landing pages. When you link to an online location, the post will generally show one of the photos that’s on the destination page.
• On your website you should include buttons for people to follow you on social media.

If you post worthwhile content, others will follow you and they’ll be alerted when you post, and if they share your content it will spread the word to new audiences, promoting your business. Once you’ve established a social media account, you can also use those ubiquitous buttons you see all over the web to share content via your account(s).