SOCIAL MEDIA 101: Say it again, and again

We know that quite a lot of smaller businesses in MI struggle with the how and the why of using social media to expand their reach, so we asked Fastflash Media to come up with a short series of tips that we will be posting every day that may help make sense of how to make it work for you.

Let’s start with something fairly simple and actually, fairly obvious when you think about it. Assuming that you have already realised that you need to make your tweets interesting and informative (funny often gets the best response), then you want as many people to see it as possible. Especially if you have just come up with the world’s funniest tweet. We all crave approval don’t we? That’s probably why social media exists.

However, probably only five per cent of your Twitter followers are seeing each of your tweets and less so on Facebook. Maybe only two per cent. Tweets in particular are fleeting. According to Pew Research Center, 40 per cent of Twitter account owners are not daily users. They’re not seeing that cracking gag you came up with.

So, you need to post your content multiple times in order to maximise your audience reach. But don’t just send exactly the same thing. You can do it by changing the headline slightly, or if it’s a blog post that you want people to read, pull out a quote or factoid from it or a striking visual or a screen grab of a recent website post. Just say the same thing a slightly different way.

This doesn’t mean you have to spend all your time mucking about with social media, sending the same thing every hour. Use a scheduling service like Tweetdeck for Twitter or Buffer which will help you integrate all your social media through one interface. You can plan a whole week’s worth of content in just a few minutes and then get back to running your business.

www.fastflashmedia.co.uk