Effective Posting on Social Media

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My first lecture at university was at 8am on a Monday morning for my course, Introduction to Marketing. I’ll never forget the first thing my lecturer said to the class which was “Social Media is the future of marketing”. At the time, Facebook wasn’t what it is nowadays and the days of Myspace and Bebo were at an end. However, as you can tell from how prevalent social media is in today’s society, it’s become one of the biggest influences in the world…

Posting on social media has become a cheap and efficient way to promote any product, service or company. However most people underestimate the factors that need to be taken into consideration when posting on channels such as Facebook, Instagram, etc…

Majority of companies have a Facebook company page; however they lack the ability to fully harness and utilise the effects of social media marketing. Depending on the business industry, common issues company pages have are their frequency of posts and their relevant content. One company I designed a communication plan for rarely posted on their Facebook and Instagram pages and when they did, it was irrelevant content to the products and services they offered. In turn, this resulted in their social media pages being obsolete towards their marketing objectives.

Posting on social media requires a number of factors that need to be taken into consideration such as:

• Frequency

• Relevance

• Timing

• Accessibility

• Legality

Obviously, these factors have a different level of scale depending on the type of business, the industry, products and services offered, etc…

Frequency

Frequency of posting on social media pages is a fickle factor as not posting enough can lose awareness for both the company and their products/services. Posting too much can annoy consumers to the point of unfollowing/boycotting the company as their posts are clogging their news feeds.

Relevance

Relevance is a major factor when posting on social media, effective posts provide relevant content to the business and the products/services provided. Posting for the sake of posting is not utilising the marketing potential on social media, such as a local nightclub posting articles about politics, or a restaurant posting videos of a popular cartoon, etc… Irrelevant posts will take away any credibility the company has on its social media pages.

Timing

Timing is crucial for posts as the idea of social media marketing is to generate the largest number of views possible to promote to consumers. Understanding the peak times to post as well as the target market are both crucial for a company’s social media page. For example, if you’re company is a nightclub the best time to promote would be late into the afternoon/early evening just before consumers head out for the night. Posting at 1am would be irrelevant as most people would already be out/gone home by that time.

Accessibility

Accessibility is a bonus feature that social media provides giving companies the chance to provide their location and contact details. Providing easily accessible contact information makes it more convenient for consumers to access the products/services the company provides.

Legality

Finally, companies on social media need to be wary of the content contained in their posts to their consumers. Marketing laws still apply on social media such as advertising alcohol prices/discounts to attract consumers. It’s illegal to post alcohol price specials to the public outside the venues both on the street and on the internet. Also, posting controversial content can generate bad publicity/negative posts and feedback from consumers.

Example of Effective Social Media Marketing:

The image above outlines a perfect example of how to post on social media to market a company/products and services provided.

Take note of the following aspects outlined:

• Posted Early in the Night (Lounge Bar, ideal for a place to go before the nightclub precinct).

• Promotes the offer for the night (Not violating any laws as no price is specified)

• Product and Service Related Content

• Shares FB Page and Easily Accessible for Users to Follow the Business.

• Links the Company Facebook Page on the status.

• Checks-In to the Business, providing the location through “location services”.

• Tags multiple friends and co-workers to generate a higher Reach.

Huson worked for a lounge bar in Surfers Paradise and spent at least 20 minutes posting on each of his promotion posts. This example outlines another factor that we haven’t discussed yet, Reach, which is how many news-feeds the post reaches.

The average Australian Facebook account has 272 friends according to the census data collected in 2016, obviously the number varies from person to person. This was posted from Huson’s personal account which according to the data means that this post reached 272 news-feeds. However, Huson tagged 48 other Surfer’s Paradise locals in his post, so not only did it reach the 272 friends on his Facebook profile, but it reached 272 news-feeds for each of the 48 people he tagged.

In other words, instead of reaching 272 news-feeds, this post reached 13,056 news-feeds, thus promoting to a much larger market.

Overall, this article only offers a brief outline of the factors that need to be considered when posting on social media. We’ve barely scratched the surface of effective social media promoting, nor have we looked at other aspects of marketing that social media provides such as analytics, etc… Obviously, the areas discussed are just a summary of my own thoughts and opinions while using a collective of various aspects from assignments I’ve completed over the years at university.

#SocialMedia #Marketing